born March 31, 1596, La Haye, Touraine, France
died February 11, 1650, Stockholm, Sweden

Latin Renatius Cartesius

French mathematician, scientist, and philosopher. Because he was one of the first to oppose scholastic Aristotelianism, he has been called the father of modern philosophy. He began by methodically doubting knowledge based on authority, the senses, and reason, then found certainty in the intuition that, when he is thinking, he exists; this he expressed in the famous statement “I think, therefore I am.? He developed a dualistic system in which he distinguished radically between mind, the essence of which is thinking, and matter, the essence of which is extension in three dimensions. Descartes’s metaphysical system is intuitionist, derived by reason from innate ideas, but his physics and physiology, based on sensory knowledge, are mechanistic and empiricist.

Family and regional background

Descartes was born in La Haye (now Descartes), France. Although La Haye was in Touraine, Descartes’s family connections were south across the Creuse River in Poitou, where his father, Joachim, owned farms and houses in Châtellerault and Poitiers. Because Joachim was a councillor in the Parlement of Brittany in Rennes, Descartes inherited a low rank of nobility. Descartes’s mother died when he was one year old. His father remarried in Rennes, leaving him in La Haye to be raised by his maternal grandmother and a nurse and probably also by his great-uncle Michel Ferrand, lieutenant general (court judge) in Châtellerault. The Descartes family was Roman Catholic, but Poitou was a Huguenot stronghold and Châtellerault a “secure city,? in which the Edict of Nantes, which gave Protestants freedom of worship in France, was worked out in 1597–98. Descartes returned to Poitou regularly until 1628.

Education, travels, and early influences

In 1606 Descartes was sent to the Jesuit college at La Flèche, established in 1604 by Henri IV. (1553-1610). At La Flèche 1,200 young gentlemen were trained for careers in military engineering, the judiciary, and government administration. Besides classical studies, science, mathematics, and metaphysics, students were taught acting, music, poetry, dancing, riding, and fencing. Descartes’s philosophy professor was Father François Véron, known later as the scourge of the Protestants. Aristotle was taught from scholastic texts. In addition, Descartes received special attention from a relative, Father Charlet, later rector of La Flèche. In 1610 Descartes participated in an imposing ceremony in which Henry IV.’s heart was placed in the cathedral of La Flèche. Henry IV’s assassination had destroyed the hope of religious tolerance in France and Germany.

In 1614 Descartes went to Poitiers, where he took a law degree in 1616. At this time Huguenot Poitiers was in virtual revolt against Louis XIII. Descartes’s father probably expected him to enter Parlement, but, because the legal age for that was 27, Descartes had seven years to wait. In 1618 he went to Breda in the Netherlands for 15 months as a student in mathematics and military architecture in the peacetime army of the Protestant ruler, Maurice, prince of Orange. There Descartes met the physicist Isaac Beeckman, who encouraged him in science and mathematics and for whom Descartes wrote his Musicae Compendium (written 1618, published 1650; Compendium of Music).

During the period 1619 to 1628, Descartes traveled in northern and southern Europe, saying that he was studying the book of the world. While in Bohemia in 1619, he had three dreams that defined for him his career as a scientist and a philosopher seeking knowledge for the benefit of humanity. By 1620 he had conceived of a universal method of deductive reasoning, applicable to all the sciences. He had also investigated reports of esoteric knowledge such as theosophical claims to command nature. Although disappointed with the followers of the magician Raymond Lulle and the alchemist Cornelius Agrippa, Descartes was impressed by the German mathematician and Rosicrucian Johann Faulhaber.

Descartes shared a number of Rosicrucian goals and habits of life. Like Rosicrucians, he lived a single, secluded life, changing residence often (during his 22 years in the Netherlands, he lived in 18 different places), practiced medicine without charge, tried to increase human longevity, and expressed optimism about the ability of science to improve the human condition. At the end of his life, he left a chest of personal papers—none of which has survived—with his close friend, the Rosicrucian physician Corneille van Hogelande, who handled his affairs in the Netherlands. Descartes, however, rejected the Rosicrucians’ magical and mystical beliefs. For him it was a time of hope for revolution in science. The English philosopher Francis Bacon, in Advancement of Learning (1605), had already proposed a new science of observation and experiment to replace the traditional Aristotelian science, as did Descartes later.

In 1620 Descartes was in the Roman Catholic army of Maximilian I, duke of Bavaria, who defeated the Protestants in Bohemia. There is, however, no evidence that Descartes ever participated in any battles; he said military life was idle, stupid, immoral, and cruel. In 1622 Descartes moved to Paris. There he gambled, rode, fenced, and went to the court, concerts, and the theatre. Among his friends were the poets Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, who dedicated his Le Socrate chrétien (1652; “Christian Socrates?) to Descartes, and Théophile de Viau, who was burned in effigy and imprisoned in 1623 for writing verses mocking religious themes. Descartes also made friends with the mathematician Claude Mydorge and with Father Marin Mersenne, a man of universal learning who during his lifetime wrote thousands of letters to hundreds of scholars, writers, mathematicians, and scientists, keeping everyone aware—despite his almost unreadable handwriting—of what everyone else was doing. Mersenne was Descartes’s main contact with the larger intellectual world. Descartes regularly hid from his friends in order to work, writing treatises, now lost, on fencing and metals. He acquired a high reputation long before he published anything.

At a talk in 1628, Descartes denied the alchemist Chandoux’s claim that probabilities are as good as certainties in science and demonstrated his own method for attaining certainty. The Cardinal de Bérulle, who had founded the Oratorian teaching order in 1611 to rival the Jesuit order and who was forming the Compagnie du Saint-Sacrement (“Company of the Sacred Sacrament?), a militant, secret society of laymen to fight Protestantism, was impressed and invited Descartes to a conference. Bérulle was a strange combination of astute politician, courtier, and mystic who often advised the Queen Mother and talked familiarly with God and angels every day. Many commentators speculate that Bérulle urged Descartes to write an Augustinian metaphysics to replace Jesuit teaching. There can be no question that, in one way or another, Bérulle tried to recruit Descartes to the Catholic cause. The result, however, was that within weeks Descartes left for the Netherlands, which was Protestant, took great precautions to conceal his whereabouts, and did not return to France for 16 years. Rather than taking Bérulle as director of his conscience, as some argue, it is probable that Descartes—who was a Roman Catholic but not an enthusiast, who was accused of being a Rosicrucian, who was from a Huguenot province, who glorified reason, and who advocated religious tolerance—was frightened by the mystical, militant Bérulle.

Descartes said that he went to the Netherlands to enjoy a greater liberty than was available anyplace else and to avoid the distractions of Paris and friends so that he could have the leisure and solitude to think. (He had inherited enough money and property to live independently.) The Netherlands was a haven of tolerance. Descartes could be an original, independent thinker there without fear, for example, of being burned for giving natural explanations of miracles, as was Lucilio Vanini in 1619, or of being drafted as a soldier for the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation. He opposed vows that restricted liberty and said, when accused of having illegitimate children, that, after all, he was a man and had taken no vows of chastity. In France, by contrast, religious intolerance was mounting. The Jews were expelled in 1615, and the last Protestant stronghold, La Rochelle, was crushed—with Bérulle’s participation—only weeks before Descartes’s departure. Catholic commentators insist that Descartes would have been safe in France, but the Parlement of Paris passed a decree in 1624 forbidding attacks on Aristotle on pain of death. Although the Catholic priests Mersenne and Pierre Gassendi did publish attacks without being persecuted, heretics continued to be burned, and laymen lacked church protection. Descartes may have felt in some jeopardy because of his friendship with such libertines as Father Claude Picot, a bon vivant known as “the Atheist Priest,? with whom Descartes left his financial affairs in France.

Residence in the Netherlands

In 1629 Descartes went to the university at Franeker, where he stayed with a Roman Catholic family and wrote the first draft of his Meditations. He registered at the University of Leiden in 1630, where he gained as a disciple the physician Henri Reneri. In 1631 he visited Denmark and in 1633–34 was in Germany with the physician and alchemist Étienne de Villebressieu, who invented siege engines, a portable bridge, and a two-wheeled stretcher. The physician Henri Regius taught Descartes’s views at the University of Utrecht in 1639, starting a fierce controversy with the Calvinist theologian Gisbertus Voetius that continued until the end of Descartes’s life. In his Letter to Voetius of 1648, Descartes made a plea for religious tolerance and the rights of man. He said that he wrote not only for Christians but also for Turks—meaning libertines, infidels, deists, and atheists. He argued that, because Protestants and Roman Catholics worship the same God, both can hope for heaven. When the controversy became intense, however, Descartes sought the protection of the French ambassador and of his friend Constantijn Huygens, secretary to Prince Frederick Henry, ruler of the Dutch Republic.

In 1635 Descartes’s daughter Francine was born to Helena Jans and was baptized in the Reformed Church in Deventer. Although Francine is referred to as Descartes’s illegitimate daughter, her baptism is recorded in a register for legitimate births. Descartes said that his greatest sorrow was Francine’s death of scarlet fever at the age of five and that he was not a philosopher who believed that one must refrain from tears to prove oneself a man.

The World, Rules, and Discourse on Method

In 1633 Descartes was about to publish Le Monde (published 1664; The World), when he heard that the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei had been condemned in Rome for publishing the view that the Earth revolves around the Sun. Because this Copernican position is central to Descartes’s cosmology and physics, he suppressed The World, hoping that the church would retract its condemnation and make it possible for him to publish his work later. He feared the church, but he also hoped that his physics would one day replace Aristotle’s in church doctrine.

In 1637 Descartes published Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method), one of the first important modern philosophical works not written in Latin. Descartes said that he wrote in French so that all who had good sense, including women, could read his work and learn to use their reason to think for themselves. He believed that everyone could tell true from false by the natural light of reason. In three essays forming part of the Discourse, he illustrated his method for utilizing reason in the search for truth in the sciences. In Dioptrics he then presented the law of refraction, in Meteorology he explained the rainbow, and in Geometry he gave an exposition of analytic geometry, which is a method of representing geometric figures with algebraic equations that made many previously unsolvable problems solvable. He also introduced the conventions of representing known numerical quantities with a, b, c, . . . , unknowns with x, y, z, . . . , and squares, cubes, and other powers with numerical superscripts, as in x2, x3, . . . , which made algebraic notation much clearer than it had been before.

In Discourse and Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (Rules for the Direction of the Mind), written by 1628 but not published until 1701, Descartes gave four rules for reasoning: (1) Accept nothing as true that is not self-evident. (2) Divide problems into their simplest parts. (3) Solve problems by proceeding from simple to complex. (4) Recheck the reasoning. These rules are a direct application of mathematical procedures. Descartes insisted that key notions and the limits of each problem must be clearly defined.

In Discourse he also provided a provisional moral code (later presented as final) for use while seeking truth: (1) Obey local customs and laws. (2) Make decisions on the best evidence and then stick to them firmly as though they were certain. (3) Change desires rather than the world. (4) Always seek truth. This code exhibits Descartes’s prudential conservatism, decisiveness, stoicism, and dedication. For Descartes all knowledge was like a tree—with metaphysics forming the roots, physics the trunk, and medicine, mechanics, and morals the branches—on which the fruit of knowledge is produced.

Meditations

In 1641 Descartes published in Latin—because it was dedicated to the Jesuit professors at the Sorbonne in Paris—Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (Meditations on First Philosophy in Which Is Proved the Existence of God and the Immortality of the Soul). Mersenne submitted it before publication to eminent thinkers, among whom were the Jansenist philosopher and theologian Antoine Arnauld, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and the Epicurean atomist Pierre Gassendi. Mersenne collected their critical responses and published them with the Meditations. Even though Descartes said that the Jesuit priest Pierre Bourdin, a respondent added in the second edition (1642), was a fool, these objections and replies constitute a landmark of cooperative discussion in philosophy and science at a time when dogmatism was the rule.

Descartes begins Meditations with methodic doubt, rejecting as though false all types of knowledge by which he was ever deceived. His arguments derive from the Pyrrhonism of the Greek skeptic Sextus Empiricus as reflected in the skeptical writings of Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron. Thus knowledge based on authority is set aside because even experts are sometimes wrong. Knowledge from sensory experience is declared untrustworthy because people sometimes mistake one thing for another, as with mirages. Knowledge based on reasoning is rejected as unreliable because one often makes mistakes as, for example, when adding. Finally, knowledge may be illusory because it comes from dreams or insanity or from a demon able to deceive men by making them think that they are experiencing the real world when they are not. Descartes finds certainty in the intuition that when he is thinking, even if deceived, he exists: “Cogito, ergo sum? (Latin: “I think, therefore I am?). The cogito is a logically self-evident truth that gives certain knowledge of a particular thing’s existence—that is, one’s self—but the cogito justifies accepting as certain only the existence of the person who thinks it. If all one ever knew for certain was that one exists and if one adhered to Descartes’s method of doubting all that is uncertain, then one would be reduced to solipsism, the view that nothing exists but one’s individual self and thoughts. To escape this, Descartes argues that all ideas that are as clear and distinct as the cogito must be true, for, if they were not, the cogito also, as a member of the class of clear and distinct ideas, could be doubted. Since “I think, therefore I am? cannot be doubted, all clear and distinct ideas must be true.

On the basis of clear and distinct innate ideas, Descartes then establishes that each mind is a spiritual substance and each body a part of one material substance. The mind or soul is immortal because it is unextended and cannot be broken into parts, as can extended bodies. Descartes also advances proof for the existence of God. He begins with the statement that he has an innate idea of God as a perfect being and then intuits that God necessarily exists, because, if he did not, he would not be perfect. This ontological proof for the existence of God is at the heart of Descartes’s rationalism, for it establishes certain knowledge about an existing thing solely on the basis of reasoning from innate ideas, with no help from sensory experience. Descartes then argues that, because God is perfect, he does not deceive human beings; therefore the world exists. Thus Descartes claims to have given metaphysical foundations for the existence of his own mind, of God, and of the world.

A famous objection to Descartes’s procedure is Arnauld’s Cartesian Circle, which exposes the circularity inherent in Descartes’s reasoning. To know that God exists, one must trust the clear and distinct idea of God; but, to know that clear and distinct ideas are true, one must know that God exists and does not deceive man. Descartes the rationalist rejected magic, but he failed to see that his ontological proof is word-magic based on the superstition that things can be determined by ideas and thoughts. In opposition to Descartes’s rationalism, empiricists hold that descriptions of things must come after, not before, one knows by experience that they exist.

Physics, physiology, and morals

Descartes’s goal was to be master of nature. He provided understanding of the trunk of the tree of knowledge in The World, Dioptrics, Meteorology, and Geometry and revealed its roots in Meditations; he then spent the rest of his life working on the branches of mechanics, medicine, and morals. Mechanics is the basis of his medicine, or physiology, which in turn is the basis of his moral psychology. Descartes believed that all material bodies, including the human body, are machines that operate by mechanical principles. In his physiological studies, he dissected animal bodies to show how their parts move. He argued that, because animals have no souls, they do not think or feel; thus vivisection, which Descartes pioneered, is permitted. He also described the circulation of the blood but came to the erroneous conclusion that heat in the heart expands the blood, causing its expulsion. Descartes’s L’Homme, et un traité de la formation du foetus (Man, and A Treatise on the Formation of the Foetus) was published in 1664.

In 1641 Descartes was visited by Picot and Jacques Vallée Desbarreaux, known as “the Grand Debauché,? who had published the libertine poet Théophile de Viau. Descartes used them as models for characters (he was himself model for a third) in his dialogue Recherche de la verité (1701; Search After Truth). In 1642 Samuel Sorbière, the French translator of Sextus and Hobbes, visited Descartes and wrote a charming description of him as host. Descartes then lived in the small but very elegant château of Endegeest, outside Leiden, near the court in The Hague.

In 1644 Descartes published Principia Philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy), a compilation of his physics and metaphysics. He dedicated this work to Princess Elizabeth, daughter of Elizabeth Stuart (1596-1662), titular queen of Bohemia, who was in exile in The Hague for he had developed his moral philosophy in correspondence with her. According to Descartes, a human being is a union of mind and body, two dissimilar substances that interact in the pineal gland. He reasoned that the pineal gland must be the uniting point because it is the only non-double organ in the brain, and double reports, as from two eyes, must have one place to merge. He argued that each action on a person’s sense organs causes subtle matter to move through tubular nerves to the pineal gland, causing it to vibrate distinctively. These vibrations give rise to emotions and passions and also cause the body to act. Bodily action is thus the final outcome of a reflex arc that begins with external stimuli and involves first an internal response, as, for example, when a soldier sees the enemy, feels fear, and flees. The mind cannot change bodily reactions directly—for example, it cannot will the body to fight—but it can change the pineal vibrations from those that cause fear and fleeing to those that cause courage and fighting.

Descartes furthermore argued that men can be conditioned by experience to have specific emotional responses. He, for example, had been conditioned to be attracted to cross-eyed women because he had loved a cross-eyed playmate as a child. When he remembered this fact, however, he was able to rid himself of his passion. This insight was the basis for Descartes’s defense of free will and of the mind’s ability to control the body. Despite such arguments in defense of free will, in his Les Passions de l’âme (Passions of the Soul), dedicated in 1649 to Queen Christina of Sweden, Descartes holds that most bodily actions are determined by external material causes.

Descartes’s morality was anti-Christian in that, in contrast to Calvinists and Jansenists, he suggested that grace is not necessary for salvation but that human beings are virtuous and able to achieve salvation when they do their best to find and act upon truth. His optimism about the ability of human reason and will to find truth and reach salvation is in stark contrast with the pessimism of the Jansenist (predestinarian) apologist and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who believed that salvation comes only as a gift of God’s grace. Descartes was correctly accused of holding the view of Jacobus Arminius, an anti-Calvinist Dutch theologian, that virtuous behaviour depends on free will rather than on grace. Descartes also held that, unless people believe in God and immortality, they will see no reason to be moral.

Free will, Descartes stated, is the sign of God in human nature, and human beings can be praised or blamed according to their use of it. People are good only if they act in goodwill for the good of others; such generosity is the highest virtue. Descartes was Epicurean in his assertion that human passions are good in themselves and an extreme moral optimist in his belief that to understand the good is to want to do it; because passions are willings, to want something is to will it. He was also stoic, however, in his admonition that human beings should control their passions rather than change the world.

Although Descartes wrote no political philosophy, he approved of Seneca’s admonition to acquiesce in the order of things. He rejected Machiavelli’s recommendation to lie to friends, because friendship is sacred and life’s greatest joy. Human beings cannot exist alone but must be parts of social groups, such as nations and families, and it is better to do good for the group than for oneself.

Descartes had been a puny child with a weak chest and was not expected to live. He therefore watched his health carefully and became a virtual vegetarian. In 1639 he bragged that he had not been sick for 19 years and expected to live to be 100. He told Elizabeth to think of life as a comedy; bad thoughts cause bad dreams and bodily disorders. Because there is always more good than evil in life, one can always be content, no matter how poorly off one is.

In his later years Descartes said that he had once hoped to learn to prolong life to a century or more, but he then saw that, in order to achieve that goal, the efforts of many generations would be required; he himself had not even learned to prevent a fever. Thus, he said, instead of continuing to hope for long life, he had found an easier way, namely to love life but not fear death. It is easy, he claimed, for a true philosopher to die tranquilly.

Final years and heritage

After 16 years in the Netherlands, Descartes returned to France for brief visits in 1644, 1647, and 1648, on financial business and to oversee the translation into French of Principles, Meditations, and Objections and Replies. (The translators were, respectively, Picot, the Duke de Luynes, and Claude Clerselier.) In 1647 he also met with Gassendi and Hobbes and suggested to Pascal the famous experiment of taking a barometer up Mount Puy-de-Dôme to determine the influence of the weight of the air. In Paris Descartes joined with Pierre d’Alibert, treasurer general of France, in a plan to establish a workshop school of arts and crafts in the Royal College. Picot returned with Descartes to the Netherlands for the winter of 1647–48. During Descartes’s final stay in Paris in 1648, the revolt of the nobility against the crown, known as the Fronde, broke out. As a result, Descartes left Paris precipitously on Aug. 17, 1648, only days before his mortally ill old friend Mersenne died. Back at his retreat in Egmond, in the Netherlands, Descartes was visited by the young Frans Burman, whose Conversations (first published in 1896) gives a genial and illuminating picture of Descartes.

Hector Pierre Chanut, Clerselier’s brother-in-law, helped to procure a pension for Descartes from Louis XIV (which was never paid). Then Chanut, who was French resident and later ambassador to Sweden, gained an invitation for Descartes to the court of the Swedish monarch, Queen Christina, who by the close of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) had become one of the most important and powerful monarchs in Europe. Descartes went reluctantly, arriving early in October 1649. He may have gone because he needed protection; the Fronde seemed to have destroyed his chances in Paris, and the Calvinist theologians were still harassing him in the Netherlands.

The 22-year-old Christina perversely made the 53-year-old Descartes rise at 5:00 AM to give her philosophy lessons, even though she knew of his habit of meditating in bed until 11 o’clock in the morning. She also is said to have ordered him to write a ballet in verse, La Naissance de la paix (1649; The Birth of Peace), celebrating Christina’s role in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War, and a comedy in five acts, now lost. In addition he wrote the statutes for a Swedish Academy of Arts and Sciences. While delivering these statutes to the Queen at 5:00 AM on Feb. 1, 1650, Descartes caught a chill. In this land, where he said that in winter men’s thoughts freeze like the water, Descartes developed pneumonia. He died in Stockholm on Feb. 11, 1650. Many pious last words have been attributed to Descartes, but the most trustworthy report is probably that of his German valet, Schulter, who said that Descartes was in a coma and died without saying anything at all. The last thing Descartes wrote was a letter asking his brother to continue the pension Descartes had been paying to their old nurse.

After his death, Descartes’s papers came into the possession of Clerselier, a pious Catholic, who began the process of turning Descartes into a saint by cutting, adding to, and selectively publishing his letters. This cosmetic work culminated in 1691 in the massive biography by Father Adrien Baillet, who had previously published a 17-volume Lives of the Saints. Even while Descartes was still alive, there were questions as to whether he was a Roman Catholic apologist, primarily concerned with supporting Christian doctrine, or an atheist, concerned only with protecting himself with pious sentiments while establishing a deterministic, mechanistic, and materialistic physics.

These questions remain difficult to answer, not least because many papers and manuscripts available to Clerselier and Baillet are now lost. The Roman Catholic church made its decision in 1667 by putting Descartes’s works on the Index of Forbidden Books on the very day his bones were ceremoniously placed in Sainte-Geneviève-du-Mont in Paris. During his lifetime, Protestant ministers in the Netherlands called him a Jesuit and a papist—i.e., an atheist—but he said that they were intolerant, ignorant bigots. Up to about 1930, the majority of scholars, many of whom were religious, believed that Descartes’s major concerns were metaphysical and religious. By the late 20th century, however, numerous commentators had come to believe that Descartes was a Catholic in the way he was a Frenchman and a royalist—that is, by birth and by politics.

Descartes himself said that good sense is destroyed when one thinks too much of God. He once told the German protégée Anne-Maria de Schurman that she was wasting her intellect studying Hebrew and theology. He also was perfectly aware of, although he tried to conceal, the atheistic potential of his materialist physics and physiology. Descartes also seemed indifferent to the emotional depths of religion. Whereas Pascal trembled when he looked into the infinite universe and perceived the puniness and misery of man, Descartes rejected the view that human beings are essentially miserable and sinful. Instead he exulted in the power of human reason to understand the cosmos and to promote human happiness. He held that it was impertinent to pray to God to change things, insisting rather that human beings must try to improve themselves.

Major Works:

The history of the original works and their early translations into English is as follows: Musicae Compendium (written 1618, published 1650); Renatus Des-Cartes Excellent Compendium of Musick (1653); Regulae ad Directionem Ingenii (written 1628, published 1701); Le Monde de Mr Descartes; ou, le traité de la lumière (written 1633, published 1664); Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, & chercher la verité dans les sciences. Plus la dioptrique; les meteores; et la geometrie (1637; A Discourse of a Method for the Wel-guiding of Reason, and the Discovery of Truth in Sciences, 1649); Meditationes de Prima Philosophia (1641; and its 2nd ed., with Objectiones Septimae, 1642; Six Metaphysical Meditations; Wherein It Is Proved That There Is a God, 1680); Principia Philosophiae (1644); and Les Passions de l’âme (1649; The Passions of the Soule, 1650).Descartes’s correspondence has been collected in Lettres de Mr Descartes: où sont traittées plusieurs belles questions touchant la morale, physique, medecine, & les mathematiques, ed. by Claude Clerselier, 3 vol. (1666–67); and Correspondance, ed. by Charles Adam and Gaston Milhaud, 8 vol. (1936–63, reprinted 1970). The standard edition of complete works is the multivolume Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery, published several times since it appeared in 12 vol. with a supplement in 1897–1913. See it in a later edition, 11 vol. in 13 (1974–82). It includes Descartes’s correspondence. Modern translations into English, many with valuable commentaries, include such selections as The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross, 2 vol. (1911–12, reprinted 1978); The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vol. (1984–85); Descartes: Philosophical Letters, trans. and ed. by Anthony Kenny (1970, reprinted 1981); Descartes’ Conversation with Burman, trans. by John Cottingham (1976); Le Monde; ou, traité de la lumière, trans. into English by Michael Sean Mahoney (1979); Treatise of Man, trans. by Thomas Steele Hall (1972); Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. by Paul J. Olscamp (1965); Principles of Philosophy, trans. by Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller (1983); The Passions of the Soul, trans. by Stephen Voss (1989); and Descartes, His Moral Philosophy and Psychology, trans. by John J. Blom (1978).

Additional reading

Life

Basic biographical sources are Descartes’s own works and letters. Adrien Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Des-Cartes, 2 vol. (1691, reprinted 1987), is a major source, notwithstanding its apologetic bias. Elizabeth S. Haldane, Descartes: His Life and Times (1905, reissued 1966), is an early modern biography; Charles Adam, Vie & oeuvres de Descartes: étude historique (1910), was published as part of the above-mentioned edition of complete works. See also Gustave Cohen, Écrivains français en Hollande dans la première moitié du XVIIe siècle (1920, reprinted 1976); Cornelia Serrurier, Descartes: l’homme et le penseur (1951; originally published in Dutch, 1930); Jack R. Vrooman, René Descartes: A Biography (1970); Jonathan Rée, Descartes (1974); and Leon Pearl, Descartes (1977).

Philosophy

Descartes’s philosophical doctrine is studied in many works, beginning with his contemporaries and continuing into present-day scholarship. See Benedictus de Spinoza, The Principles of Descartes’ Philosophy, trans. from Latin by Halbert Hains Britan (1905, reprinted 1974); Henri Gouhier, Les Premières pensées de Descartes: contribution à l’histoire de l’anti-Renaissance, 2nd ed. (1979), and La Pensée métaphysique de Descartes, 4th ed. (1987); Jean Laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes (1950); Geneviève Rodis-Lewis, L’ OEuvre de Descartes, 2 vol. (1971); Maxime Leroy, Descartes: le philosophe au masque (1929); Norman Kemp Smith, New Studies in the Philosophy of Descartes: Descartes as Pioneer (1952, reprinted 1987); Willis Doney (ed.), Descartes: A Collection of Critical Essays (1967); Anthony Kenny, Descartes: A Study of His Philosophy (1968, reprinted 1987); and Ferdinand Alquié, Descartes, new ed. (1969), in French; Hiram Caton, The Origin of Subjectivity: An Essay on Descartes (1973); Margaret Dauler Wilson, Descartes (1978, reprinted 1982); E.M. Curley, Descartes Against the Skeptics (1978); Nicolas Grimaldi, L’Expérience de la pensée dans la philosophie de Descartes (1978); Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (1978); Michael Hooker (ed.), Descartes: Critical and Interpretative Essays (1978); John Cottingham, Descartes (1986); Peter J. Markie, Descartes’s Gambit (1986); Willis Doney (ed.), Eternal Truths and the Cartesian Circle: A Collection of Studies (1987); Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (ed.), Méthode et métaphysique chez Descartes (1987); Gregor Sebba, The Dream of Descartes, ed. by Richard A. Watson (1987); and Theo Verbeek (ed.), La Querelle d’Utrecht: René Descartes et Martin Schoock (1988).Descartes’s theology and ontology are explored in Etienne Gilson, Études sur le rôle de la pensée médiévale dans la formation du système cartésien, 4th ed. (1975); Henri Gouhier, La Pensée religieuse de Descartes, 2nd rev. ed. (1972); J.-R. Armogathe, Theologia cartesiana: l’explication physique de l’Eucharistie chez Descartes et dom Desgabets (1977); Martial Guéroult, Descartes’ Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, 2 vol. (1984–85; originally published in French, 1953); and Jean-Luc Marion, Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes: analogie, création des vérités éternelles et fondement (1981), Sur l’ontologie grise de Descartes: science cartésienne et savoir aristotélicien dans les Regulae (1975), and Sur le prisme métaphysique de Descartes: constitution et limites de l’onto-théo-logie dans la pensée cartésienne (1986). For Descartes the scientist and mathematician, see J.F. Scott, The Scientific Work of René Descartes (1952, reprinted 1987); Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics, and Physics (1980); Desmond M. Clarke, Descartes’ Philosophy of Science (1982); Geneviève Rodis-Lewis (ed.), La Science chez Descartes (1987); and William R. Shea, The Magic of Numbers and Motion: The Scientific Career of René Descartes (1991). Interpretative studies of Descartes’s separate works include René Descartes, Discourse de la méthode, text and commentary by Etienne Gilson, 6th ed. (1987); Jean-Marie Beyssade, La Philosophie premiére de Descartes: le temps et la cohérence de la métaphysique (1979); Henri Gouhier, Descartes: essais sur le “Discours de la méthode,? la métaphysique et la morale, 3rd ed. (1973); L.J. Beck, The Metaphysics of Descartes: A Study of the Meditations (1965, reprinted 1979); Alexander Sesonske and Noel Fleming (eds.), Meta-meditations (1965); Frederick Broadie, An Approach to Descartes’ Meditations (1970); Harry G. Frankfurt, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descartes’s Meditations (1970, reprinted 1987); Richard B. Carter, Descartes’ Medical Philosophy: The Organic Solution to the Mind-Body Problem (1983); and Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes’ Meditations (1986).

Bibliographies

Gregor Sebba, Bibliographia Cartesiana: A Critical Guide to the Descartes Literature, 1800–1960 (1964), is an informative bibliography covering biographical and doctrinal books and articles. See also Vere Chappell and Willis Doney (eds.), Twenty-Five Years of Descartes Scholarship, 1960–1984: A Bibliography (1987).

Richard A. Watson

Copyright © 1994-2002 Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Sources

Encylopedia Britannica 2002, Expanded Edition DVD
Web

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article
Wikipedia article

(FRagmento) Sí, en el período comprendido entre 1601 y 1700 todavía mucha gente creía que la Tierra era el centro del Universo. Y que todos los cuerpos celestes giraban alrededor. La gente creía en la astrología, que aún no estaba muy separada de la astronomía, y la química apenas se diferenciaba de la alquimia. La evolución del ser humano no tenía otra alternativa que el creacionismo bíblico. Esas cosas ni siquiera se discutían. Sin embargo, es en este siglo donde se da el gran salto hacia la modernidad, hacia el principio de lo que hoy es la ciencia. Es un siglo de mentes brillantísimas e ilustres, en todos los ámbitos. No corresponden a un movimiento filosófico homogéneo, son más individualistas que los renacentistas, pero comienzan a plantearse el mundo sobre bases firmes. El Renacimiento había traído el fin de las viejas estructuras, de una sociedad teocrática, totalmente regida por la Iglesia. Al poner una nueva visión del mundo con acento especial en el ser humano, deja también un gran vacío. Si nada se puede explicar tan fácilmente por la fé, entonces, cuáles es la real interpretación de la naturaleza? Es por eso que en este siglo comienza a funcionar el motor de los grandes cerebros, hacia la fundación de los cimientos de la ciencia. Descartes, Galileo, Leibnitz, Hume, Torricelli, Sir Isaac Newton, son sólo algunos de los nombres que comenzarán a revolucionar el mundo del conocimiento moderno. Es un siglo en el que todo se plantea de nuevo: las formas adquieren más elaboración, más detalles. Nace el barroco, en música y en arquitectura. El hombre comienza a dar sus primeros más importantes pasos en la comprensión de su universo. Ahora, guiados por un principio básico: la confianza en la Razón humana.

Una “filosofía moderna”, que cubre lo que los historiadores llaman la Edad Moderna (desde 1.492 hasta 1.789). Esta filosofía es, en primer lugar, el heredero del pensamiento antiguo de muchas maneras. Los escritores modernos están lejos de haber roto todas las relaciones con la filosofía de los antiguos, que conocían perfectamente el contrario, a veces prestado su vocabulario. Por otro lado, los modernos a menudo han diseñado su propio trabajo como una mejora de lo que los filósofos de la antigüedad ya había hecho, que a veces les llevó a oponerse a ellos.
Este deseo de volver a la filosofía de los antiguos parece mejorar, desde el Renacimiento, a través del movimiento humanista. Se continúa en el siglo XVII, cuando la ciencia moderna surgió, y donde los grandes filósofos a menudo se aprenden en la ciencia (Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz), es entonces los principales enfoques de conocimiento que distinguen a los dos las principales tendencias que son el racionalismo (Descartes, Leibniz) y el empirismo (Hume, Locke). Durante el mismo período, la expansión de la filosofía política moderna, empezando por el hombre tal cual es y no lo que debería ser (Maquiavelo, Hobbes, Spinoza).
Pero también incluye la filosofía moderna, desde finales del siglo XVII, la Ilustración, que se adjunta a disipar las tinieblas del oscurantismo y la ignorancia por el triunfo de la razón y educar a la gente, especialmente a través del proyecto enciclopédico (en Alembert, Diderot), sino también por la elaboración de una filosofía política que hace hincapié en la democracia, la tolerancia y la soberanía del pueblo (Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau Voltaire). Esto creará la filosofía política del liberalismo y el republicanismo.
El Renacimiento [editar]

La modernité philosophique et le projet moderne

par Martin Godon, du cégep du Vieux Montréal

Introduction

Au XVIIe siècle, on assiste à divers bouleversements dans le monde de la pensée. On remet alors en question les autorités du passé ainsi que la tradition. Dans ce contexte, les croyances religieuses et les superstitions prennent une nouvelle dimension. Désormais, elles ne concernent que la vie personnelle. En conséquence, les dogmes de la foi n’ont plus à intervenir dans le cadre du développement de la pensée. Cette révolution est le fruit d’un lent et long processus qui s’amorce dès la fin du Moyen Âge, s’accélérant et se précisant à la Renaissance, et il conduit certains penseurs modernes à s’opposer à ceux qui veulent rester fidèles aux idéaux du passé.

Principales caractéristiques

Chronologiquement, l’époque moderne succède à la Renaissance. Le mot « moderne » vient du latin modernus et signifie : qui est récent. L’attitude intellectuelle qui caractérise la pensée moderne joue encore un rôle dominant dans notre société. Mais la modernité est tout d’abord un phénomène de civilisation caractérisé par une révolution intellectuelle majeure, elle-même stimulée par un développement technologique sans précédent. Les progrès du transport, l’apparition de l’imprimerie et l’urbanisation vont faciliter la circulation des connaissances. Dès lors, la référence à la tradition va prendre un sens nouveau. Ainsi, les penseurs modernes vont jusqu’à s’opposer explicitement aux idées religieuses ou traditionnelles qui dominaient à l’époque précédente.

Ouvert à la nouveauté, on tente alors de construire une représentation du monde à partir de nouveaux fondements, de nouveaux paradigmes (paradigme: modèle). Par exemple, on abandonne la représentation géocentrique du cosmos (Système de Ptolémée) pour une construction héliocentrique de l’univers (N. Copernic). Bref, la terre n’est plus le centre du monde.

Les progrès technologiques qui caractérisent la naissance de la modernité vont également favoriser la transformation de la vie économique, sociale et politique. Graduellement, une économie industrielle va se développer. Cette forme de production et de distribution s’inspire d’une des principales valeurs de la pensée moderne : l’efficacité. Sur le plan proprement philosophique, la notion relativement nouvelle d’individu rationnel et autonome, affirmant de plus en plus sa liberté de conscience (Luther) et d’action face au féodalisme religieux d’abord, politique ensuite, constitue un terreau favorable à la vision industrielle et capitaliste du monde.

La pensée moderne va trouver de nouveaux fondements dans ces valeurs d’efficacité technique et instrumentale et de liberté. Elle va notamment valoriser particulièrement les pouvoirs de notre raison. C’est donc en elle-même que la pensée moderne va trouver les nouveaux fondements métaphysiques qu’elle cherche. Cela signifie qu’on attribue à la subjectivité un rôle fondamental dans le processus de la connaissance. Autrement dit, la vérité ne correspond plus ni à une révélation divine ou mystique, ni à une croyance très ancienne. Dorénavant, on admet comme vérité uniquement ce qui peut faire l’objet d’un examen critique par la raison, par suite d’une démonstration strictement rationnelle. Le concept de modernité philosophique désigne cette nouvelle manière de penser ainsi que la nouvelle hiérarchie de valeur qui en découle. On peut donc dire de cette époque qu’elle est l’ère de la raison triomphante.

Qu’on pense à René Descartes (1596-1650), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), John Locke (1632-1704), Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716), David Hume (1711-1776) et bien d’autres encore, les philosophes modernes sont préoccupés à un très haut degré par le sens de leur démarche et par la rigueur et l’exactitude de leur système. Dans ce contexte, les mathématiques puis les sciences de la nature vont souvent monopoliser les énergies. Les modernes croient, parfois aveuglément, au pouvoir libérateur de la science. Voilà pourquoi c’est à cette dernière qu’on va demander de produire une société d’individus libres de toutes contraintes.

La raison

Parce qu’ils ne tiennent plus compte de la révélation, de la foi et de la croyance religieuse comme critère de vérité, les penseurs modernes ne considèrent plus l’univers comme un monde rempli de mystères insondables. Concrètement, la pensée moderne n’accepte que les explications qui sont rationnelles. Cette autonomie de la raison constitue la principale caractéristique de la pensée moderne. Le monde n’est plus une structure sacrée, mais une réalité intelligible dont on peut découvrir les lois par une observation rigoureuse et méthodique. Bref, on croit que l’univers obéit à des lois rationnelles. C’est-à-dire que les lois qui déterminent la nature sont conformes aux lois qui déterminent la pensée. Par ailleurs, les penseurs modernes considèrent que chaque être humain possède la capacité de raisonner. Toute personne, en principe, peut donc comprendre les lois qui gouvernent la nature. Pour cela, il suffit de se donner la peine de réfléchir rationnellement, de bien conduire sa raison pour trouver quelque vérité, comme dit Descartes.

Puisque chaque individu possède la capacité de raisonner convenablement, les penseurs modernes vont croire que tous les humains sont égaux. En conséquence, ils vont inviter chaque humain à se servir de sa pensée afin de se libérer du pouvoir de toute forme d’autorité arbitraire. Par sa raison, l’individu possède donc une dignité qui lui est propre et en vertu de laquelle on ne lui demande plus d’être immolé au profit de puissances qui le dépassent. Pour le penseur moderne, le moi (ou encore l’individu ou la subjectivité) et tout ce qui s’y rattache prend donc une valeur primordiale, presque sacrée.

Cependant, il ne faut pas croire que les intellectuels modernes ont inventé la raison ou la rationalité. Il ne faut pas oublier que depuis leur naissance, la philosophie et les sciences favorisent la pensée rationnelle. Mais, soit la raison était un outil parmi d’autres, soit la raison obéissait, du moins en partie, à d’autres principes que les siens propres. Ce qui est distinctif de la pensée moderne c’est l’invention d’une nouvelle attitude intellectuelle selon laquelle la raison obéit exclusivement à des règles qu’elle s’est données elle-même en toute rigueur dans le but d’établir des liens indubitables entre les causes et les effets observables dans la nature ou entre les idées et les réalités auxquelles elles correspondent. On nomme cette attitude intellectuelle le rationalisme et il va susciter un grand enthousiasme pour toute une catégorie de penseurs. Le rationalisme conduit le penseur à chercher des certitudes qui peuvent être expliquées rationnellement hors de tout doute, tandis que dans les siècles passés, les penseurs cherchaient souvent, tant par l’usage de la raison que par d’autres outils, des vérités révélées de type interprétatif.

Pour le rationalisme cartésien, la nature est uniquement composée de matière et elle fonctionne comme une machine, c’est-à-dire que l’univers est strictement régi par des forces mécaniques qui sont également soumises aux lois de la raison. On peut dire que la raison semble avoir pris possession de tout dans l’univers tel qu’il est conçu par les rationalistes. Ceux-ci découvrent aussi que les lois de la nature peuvent être exprimées en langage mathématique. Autrement dit, on prend conscience que la matière et les forces mécaniques à l’œuvre dans la nature sont mesurables. Ainsi, grâce aux mathématiques on va pouvoir lire le grand livre de la nature.

Le projet moderne

Nicolas Copernic (1473-1543), Johannes Kepler (1571-1630), Isaac Newton (1642-1723), Galilée (1564-1642) et tous les scientifiques modernes cherchent à comprendre l’univers dans un but bien précis. Il s’agit de devenir, selon l’expression de Descartes, maître et possesseur de la nature par l’usage de la raison, cela afin d’améliorer le sort des êtres humains. On peut parler du projet moderne : par le progrès des sciences et des arts, les penseurs modernes souhaitaient libérer l’humain de ses souffrances et de ce qui l’aliène. On influence donc le développement des forces productives en vue d’une domination des phénomènes naturels par la science et la technique. Les philosophes et les scientifiques modernes croyaient que ce développement du savoir et de la technologie devait nécessairement produire une amélioration de nos conditions sociales et politiques. Le projet moderne est donc à la fois philosophique, scientifique et sociopolitique. Ce désir de libération grâce aux bienfaits de la science et de la technologie donne lieu à un renouveau scientifique sans précédent. Trois éléments caractérisent ce renouveau :

a) Un travail d’observation méthodique : afin de comprendre et de dominer la nature, il faut travailler avec rigueur, ce qui signifie l’observation méthodique des phénomènes naturels. S’ajoute à cela la validation des théories et des hypothèses par un travail méticuleux d’expérimentation. L’exactitude des conceptions théoriques doit permettre de dominer tout processus naturel ou social qui asservit l’être humain.

b) L’unité des sciences : par l’usage commun des mathématiques, les scientifiques modernes envisagent les sciences comme un arbre. Ainsi, puisque les sciences partagent le même langage, on en vient à imaginer un ordre hiérarchique des sciences et des connaissances, les mathématiques constituant le tronc auquel se rattachent les branches des diverses sciences.

c) Des progrès et inventions multiples : grâce à l’observation méthodique et un travail rigoureux, on assiste à de nombreuses découvertes théoriques qui vont souvent conduire à diverses inventions pratiques ayant pour but d’améliorer le sort de la condition humaine. Ici s’incarne l’idée maîtresse du projet moderne, celle d’un « Progrès Libérateur ». Dans ce contexte, l’efficacité et la productivité sont des valeurs extrêmement positives. Les penseurs modernes ne concevaient pas le côté déshumanisant que l’on attribue souvent à ces valeurs aujourd’hui.

Il ne faut surtout pas oublier que c’est l’usage rigoureux de la raison qui seul peut rendre possible ce progrès libérateur. On utilise désormais le concept de rationalité instrumentale pour désigner cette attitude de la pensée qui est exclusivement orientée vers le développement technoscientifique.

Conclusion

Finalement, la modernité va transformer la vie politique occidentale. Puisque tous sont aptes à se servir de leur raison, tous doivent avoir le droit de s’exprimer et doivent se partager les rênes du pouvoir. Les modernes vont donc, peu à peu, essayer de remplacer les formes de pouvoir fondées sur la violence et l’arbitraire par la démocratie.

Dans presque toutes les activités scientifiques, artistiques et intellectuelles de cette époque, on va assister à une lutte féroce entre ceux qui défendent les traditions et ceux qui font la promotion des idées nouvelles. Cette opposition a culminé en littérature dans ce que les historiens ont appelé la querelle des Anciens et des Modernes. Du côté des Anciens on compte Nicolas Boileau (1636-1711), Jean de Lafontaine (1621-1695), Jean Racine (1639-1699), Jean de La Bruyère (1645-1696), tandis qu’on peut classer Charles Perrault (1628-1703), Thomas Corneille (1625-1709) et Fontenelle (1657-1757) dans le rang des Modernes.

Sommairement, on peut dire que l’ère moderne s’achève au début du vingtième siècle. Cependant, dès le début du dix-neuvième siècle, des philosophes vont rejeter le projet moderne. Durant le vingtième siècle, les critiques vont devenir de plus en plus radicales. Ceux qu’on nomme parfois les penseurs postmodernes vont chercher à montrer que si la pensée rationnelle a produit le progrès promis, en revanche, ce progrès ne s’est pas avéré libérateur; que la raison ne peut pas être totalement fiable, digne de confiance; que la pensée moderne a rendu notre monde terne et gris, qu’elle est donc responsable du désenchantement du monde.

© CVM, 2003

http://213.0.8.18/portal/educantabria/contenidoseducativosdigitales/bachillerato/citexfi/citex/cit/Arendt/arendttexto.pdf

Dans Condition de l’homme moderne, Hannah Arendt se propose de « penser ce que nous faisons ». Car c’est dans l’examen des activités humaines que l’on peut découvrir ce qu’est la condition humaine à l’époque moderne. Travail, oeuvre, action. Voilà, pour Hannah Arendt, la triade de base de la vie active. Dans les deux premiers chapitres du livre, elle définit les problèmes et les concepts mis en jeu : elle explique ce qu’elle entend par « condition humaine » et précise les rapports qui existent entre privé et public. Dans les chapitres III, IV et V, elle passe successivement en examen les trois domaines de la vie active de l’homme. Le travail est l’activité qui correspond au processus biologique du corps humain ; la condition humaine du travail est la vie elle-même. L’oeuvre correspond à la non-naturalité de l’existence humaine et fournit un monde artificiel d’objets ; la condition humaine de l’oeuvre est l’appartenance au monde. L’action, seule activité qui mette directement en rapport les hommes, sans l’intermédiaire des objets ni de la matière, correspond à la condition humaine de la pluralité, condition spécifique de la vie politique. Dans l’extrait que nous proposons ici, Hannah Arendt montre comment le pardon et la promesse permettent de riposter à l’irréversibilité et à l’imprévisibilité qui grèvent notre faculté d’agir, avant de développer, dans le sixième et dernier chapitre du livre, une analyse historique de son concept et de s’interroger sur la permanence de la capacité humaine d’agir à l’âge moderne

Las metáforas de la
memoria
Nora Tage Muler
Nasielsky
El presente articulo pretende hacer foco en el pensamiento y aporte de la filosofa
Hannah Arendt.
Durante la lectura de sus libros identifique un concepto que se reiteraba en
varias ocasiones en sus escritos: el concepto de “paria”.
La autora hace una caracterizacion de diversos tipos de parias, de acuerdo
a las diferentes contingencias a las que estas personas se veian expuestas,
ademas de que tambien se suman aspectos de su propia estructura de personalidad.
Arendt utiliza, por otra parte, en esta caracterizacion una poderosa metafora:
la de una familia sentada alrededor de una mesa. Esta imagen ayuda a explicar
lo que para ella es la vida en comunidad. Todo esto opero en mi una asociacion
con un antiguo ritual que celebra el pueblo judio durante la celebracion de
Pésaj.
Esta asociacion da lugar a la hipotesis que intentare desarrollar a lo largo de
este trabajo y que consiste en intentar probar que las diferentes acepciones
del concepto de “paria” que Hannah Arendt nos trae se relacionan con unos
personajes explicitamente descriptos en el libro que guia la celebracion de
Pésaj antes mencionada. Tratare de identificar a cada uno en su correlato con
las descripciones que de los diferentes tipos de paria hace Hannah Arendt, en
un intento por mostrar como los lenguajes y las metaforas se entrelazan para
generar y guardar –persistentemente– la memoria colectiva. Intentare contextualizarlos,
tratando de identificar quienes de ellos es cada uno, tanto en el
periodo critico al que la autora se refiere como en los lugares que ocupan dentro
del escenario metaforico del rito de la mesa de Pésaj.
Nora Tage Muler Nasielsky, Licenciada en Ciencias y Humanidades, psicologa social, docente
y ex directora de la Fundacion Memoria del Holocausto.
274 / Nuestra Memoria
Desarrollo
Ante todo, .quien fue Hannah Arendt?
Ella misma se presenta: “Soy un individuo judío –como ustedes pueden
ver–, nacida y educada en Alemania –como tampoco es difícil de adivinar–, y
durante ocho largos y felices años me formé en Francia.” (Asi se autorretrataba
en el discurso pronunciado en Copenhague en 1975, con motivo de la concesion
del premio Sconning.)1
Podemos intuir, por su presentacion, que su ser judio ocupa un lugar de
prioridad, elemento que es confirmado en la produccion de Arendt, en la que
indaga acerca de este aspecto y de los efectos y consecuencias que le acarrea a
un individuo el portar dicha ascendencia en la Europa del siglo XX.
El concepto de “paria”. Quien retoma este concepto es Bernard Lazare,2 y
posteriormente es empleado tambien por Herzl, Benjamin y otros coetaneos de
la autora. Arendt profundiza en la propuesta conceptual que hizo Lazare de
“paria”.
Dicho concepto, de acuerdo a la definicion de la Real Academia de la Lengua
Espanola, refiere a: “una persona de la casta ínfima de los hindúes; considerados
personas insignificantes, impuras, viles y –por tanto– intocables que,
perteneciendo a la categoría social más baja, es evitada por el resto de las castas.
Son privados de todos los derechos sociales y religiosos”.
Para Hannah Arendt, el paria es mucho mas que un apatrida, que un desarraigado:
es un outsider.3
Para comprender con seriedad y profundidad el significado que la autora da
a la palabra “paria” debemos remitirnos a la epoca historica en la que la autora
despliega su pensamiento y analisis.
Podriamos decir que el mismo abarca los acontecimientos acaecidos entre
inicios del siglo XIX y el siglo XX. Durante ese periodo focaliza su vision en las
causas, efectos y consecuencias del surgimiento de los movimientos politicos
totalitarios, que fueron corolario de multiples luchas intestinas y nacionales,
revoluciones sociales y politicas, enfrentamientos y confrontacion de ideologias
en una Europa que declinaba de la Ilustracion.
En este macromarco hay un elemento que atraviesa todo el cuadro, y es el
antisemitismo arraigado en la cultura y la sociedad europeas.
Alemania, pais de nacimiento de Hannah Arendt, no escapaba a esta descripcion,
sino que –de hecho– fue paradigma del despliegue de este odio visceral.
1 Arendt, Hannah. “Introduccion”, en La condición humana. Barcelona, Paidos, 1993, pag. 13.
2 Arendt, Hannah. Una revisión de la historia judía y otros ensayos. Buenos Aires, Paidos,
2005, pag. 58.
3 Arendt, H., “Introduccion”, op. cit., pag. 2.
Las metáforas de la memoria / 275
Previo al surgimiento del nazismo regia en dicho pais lo que se conoce como
“estado de excepción”.
Segun Agamben, Alemania estaba regida por una dictadura presidencial,
con un Parlamento en funciones, pero sin normativa para legislar. Conclusion:
absoluta anomia.
Era un “Estado dual”, poniendo junto a la Constitucion legal, una segunda
estructura –a menudo, juridicamente no formalizada–, que podia existir al lado
de la otra solo gracias al estado de excepcion.4
Agamben se refiere al contexto: “Antes de esto decíamos: ‘Está bien, tenemos
enemigos. Es perfectamente natural. ¿Por qué no habríamos de tener enemigos?’.
Pero lo de ahora era diferente. Era verdaderamente como si se hubiera
abierto un abismo. Esto no debería haber pasado. Y no me refiero sólo al número
de las víctimas. Me refiero al método, la fabricación de cadáveres y todo lo
demás. No es necesario que entre en detalles. Esto no tenía que haber pasado.
Allí sucedió algo con lo que no podemos reconciliarnos. Ninguno de nosotros
puede hacerlo”.5
En otro parrafo del libro Estado de excepción, Agamben escribe: “Estado
de excepción es ese momento del derecho en el que se suspende el derecho
(orden jurídico), precisamente para garantizar su continuidad, e inclusive su
existencia”.
“Estado de excepcion” es la forma legal de lo que no puede tener forma legal,
porque es incluido en la legalidad a traves de su exclusion; liga y –al mismo
tiempo– abandona al viviente en manos del “no derecho”.6
El estado de excepcion es la doble naturaleza del Derecho, esta ambiguedad
constitutiva del orden juridico por el cual este parece estar siempre –al mismo
tiempo– afuera y adentro de si mismo.
“El estado de excepción es el lugar en el cual esta ambigüedad emerge a
plena luz.”7
Agamben retoma y escribe: “Foucault ha mostrado que cada subjetivación
implica la inserción en una red de relaciones de poder (…). Pienso que tan
interesantes como los procesos de subjetivación son los procesos de desubjetivación
(…). El sujeto no es otra cosa más que el resto, la no coincidencia de
estos dos procesos”.8
Segun una opinion difundida –escribe Agamben–, de hecho, el estado de
4 Agamben, Giorgio. Estado de excepción. Buenos Aires, Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2004,
pag. 96.
5 Agamben, Giorgio. Lo que queda de Auschwitz. Valencia, Pre-Textos, 2000, pag. 73.
6 Agamben, G., Estado…, op. cit., pag. 14.
7 Idem.
8 Ibid., pag. 17.
276 / Nuestra Memoria
excepcion constituye un punto de desequilibrio entre el derecho publico y el
hecho politico.9
Y concluye: Es la “tierra de nadie” entre el derecho publico y el hecho
politico.
Walter Benjamin se refiere al estado de excepcion escribiendo: “La tradición
de los oprimidos nos enseña que el estado de excepción en el cual vivimos es
la regla, tendremos –entonces– enfrente, como nuestro deber, la producción del
estado de excepción efectivo, y esto mejorará nuestra posición de lucha contra
el fascismo (1942)”.10
Tambien Primo Levi se refiere al estado de excepcion: “Cualquiera de nosotros
puede ser procesado, condenado y ajusticiado sin siquiera saber por
qué”.11
Y agrega: “Auschwitz es precisamente el lugar en el que el estado de excepción
coincide perfectamente con la regla y en que la situación extrema se
convierte en paradigma mismo de lo cotidiano”.12
En otro parrafo, nuevamente Agamben cita a Primo Levi:
La específica aporía ética de Auschwitz: es el lugar en que no es decente
seguir siendo decentes, en el que los que creyeron conservar dignidad y
respeto por sí mismos sienten vergüenza con respecto a los que la habían
perdido de inmediato.13
Como podemos apreciar en la pluma de estos pensadores, la situacion imperante
en la epoca precedente al ascenso del nazismo al poder preparo el terreno
y aceito todo el instrumental social, cultural, politico y juridico en donde el tan
mentado descredito, vituperacion, aislamiento, confinamiento y posterior aniquilacion
se darian en masa, una vez que el nazismo se apoderara de Alemania
y gran parte de Europa.
Muchas fueron las voces que alertaron y se pronunciaron en visperas de la
ascension nazi y durante el proceso de aplicacion de su politica. El Parnaso
Aleman es una de ellas.
Esta agrupacion es uno de los tantos ejemplos de resistencia frente al contexto
hostil y a la ideologia imperante de “estado de excepcion”.
Intentaban alzar su voz en respuesta a este tipo de orden impuesto.
Una de esas voces es la de Moritz Goldstein, quien escribe en 1912:
9 Ibid., pag. 23.
10 Ibid., pag. 111.
11 Agamben, G., Lo que queda…, op. cit., pag. 16.
12 Ibid., pag. 50.
13 Ibid., pag. 62.
Las metáforas de la memoria / 277
Nosotros, los judíos, administramos la propiedad intelectual de un pueblo
que nos niega el derecho y la capacidad de hacerlo.
Entre nosotros podemos tener la impresión de hablarles como alemanes
a otros alemanes –tenemos la impresión–. Podemos llamarnos Max
Reinhart y haber llevado el teatro a nuevas alturas, o podemos –como
lo hizo Hugo von Hofmannschtal– haber reemplazado el lenguaje trillado
de Schiller con un nuevo estilo poético. Podemos llamar a esto
“alemán”, los otros lo llaman “judío”. Detectan el elemento “asiático” y
extrañan el “sentimiento alemán”, y si –a pesar de sus reservas– se ven
obligados a reconocer nuestros logros, su único deseo es que logremos
mucho menos (…). No queremos renunciar a nuestra herencia alemana.
Pero tampoco queremos mendigar favores que se nos han negado tanto
tiempo –favores que, después de un tiempo de aparente reconciliación,
se nos niegan de nuevo otra vez–.
Concluye esta carta, que rompe tabues tanto intrajudios como asimilacionistas,
diciendo: “hubiera preferido lavar la ropa sucia en casa (…). Pero nosotros
no tenemos casa propia”.14
.Por que eligio este grupo llamarse “El Parnaso aleman”?
Parnaso –en la mitologia griega– fue hijo de Poseidon y de la ninfa Cleodora,
heroe eponimo de la cadena montanosa que se extiende entre los territorios de
los dorios y los focenses. Se le atribuye la fundacion del oraculo de Delfos –que
luego habria de ocupar Apolo– en la ladera de esta montana, en la que tenian
su morada las Musas, que acudieron –llamadas por este dios– procedentes del
monte Helicon. Considerada por los griegos como morada de las Musas y de
Apolo; en la literatura, asi como en la poesia, se considera al Parnaso como
la patria simbolica de los poetas.15 El Parnaso Aleman fue una agrupacion de
hombres de la cultura alemana, absolutamente representativos de la misma, que
destacaron en las diferentes artes, desde la literatura al teatro, desde la poesia
hasta la filosofia. Eran considerados la “Intelligentzia Alemana” por excelencia,
de ahi la inspiracion en este nombre: “Parnaso”.
Este grupo fue integrado por personalidades de la talla de Freud, Walter
Benjamin, Adorno, Gershom Scholem, Kafka, entre otros tantos. Los unia su
ascendencia europea y su pertenencia al judaismo.
Con esta descripcion podemos comprender mas profundamente la carta de
Moritz Goldstein, en la que –ya en 1912– denuncia el prejuicio y la censura y
14 Wohlfarth, Irving. Hombres del extranjero. Mexico D. F., Taurus, 1999, pag. 65.
15 Concepto “Parnaso”, en Wikipedia: es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parnaso.
278 / Nuestra Memoria
alerta a defender el derecho de expresarse, en linea con su herencia alemana y
con su particular mirada critica legada, por su ascendencia judia. La “emigracion
interior”, que los mejores alemanes escogerian durante la epoca nazi, habia
sido –por mucho tiempo– la situacion normal de los mas perspicaces entre
la “Intelligentzia judeoalemana”.16
Benjamin se la describe a Rang en una carta, citada en Hombres del extranjero,
“como un exilio interior en la Alemania misma y uno de Alemania de sí
misma, un exilio que es –por tanto– representativo de la nación como un todo”.
“No es como un guardián oficial, sino como exiliado que uno puede –paradójicamente–
hablar en nombre de la nación en su conjunto.” No obstante, y aun
con todas las dificultades que conllevaba la Ilustracion, era –segun algunos–
la opcion mas enriquecedora: “A pesar de lo ambigua que –entretanto– había
mostrado ser la emancipación –en especial, si uno era un judío europeo–, la
realización del proyecto de la Ilustración seguía siendo la única consumación
que se podía celosamente desear”.17
Segun Roberto Esposito, “La situación a la que fueron empujados estos pensadores
–a la vez de ser forzada– puede leerse como una imposición artificialmente
peligrosa, ya que consiste en una trampa con la realidad”. Retoma
Esposito, con el pensamiento de Kant: “¿Pero hasta qué punto pensaríamos si
no pensáramos –por decirlo así– en comunidad con otros, a los cuales participamos
de nuestros pensamientos y ellos, a nosotros, de los suyos? No es posible
pensar fuera de la comunidad porque la comunidad constituye más que el
objeto del pensamiento, su propia raíz. Pertenecemos al mundo antes, incluso,
que a nosotros mismos”. La comunidad es lo que relaciona a los hombres en
la modalidad de la diferencia entre ellos, que Kant llama “respeto” y distingue
del “amor”.18
A la luz de los hechos expuestos, .podemos decir que esta Intelligentzia
alemana era representativa de la “comunidad alemana”? O al menos, .podemos
afirmar que era parte integrante de la misma? Para responder a este interrogante
sera conducente consultar las definiciones que realiza Roberto Esposito, en
su libro Communitas. Segun Esposito, el termino “comunidad” (communitas:
comun, y munus: comun) es lo diferente a lo propio, no es lo propio. En realidad,
comienza donde lo propio termina. Se puede relacionar, alli, lo publico
diferenciado de lo particular. Munus es la caracterizacion social del deber y
el don. Nos indica que hay una obligacion de intercambio, de retribucion.19
Continua el autor, definiendo: “Lo que une a todas estas concepciones es el
16 Wohlfarth, I., op. cit., pag. 72.
17 Ibid., pag. 37.
18 Esposito, Roberto. Communitas. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2003, pag. 113. Tambien ver:
Esposito, Roberto. Inmunitas. Buenos Aires, Amorrortu, 2005.
Las metáforas de la memoria / 279
presupuesto no meditado de que la comunidad es una ‘propiedad’ de los sujetos
que une. Un atributo, una determinación, un predicado que los califica
como perteneciente al mismo conjunto. Inclusive, una ‘sustancia’ producida
por su unión”.20 “Se agrega a su naturaleza de sujetos, haciéndolos también
‘sujetos de comunidad’. Entidad mayor, superior, mejor, que la simple identidad
individual.”21 “Tienen en común lo que les es propio, son propietarios de
lo que les es común.”22 “Communitas” es el conjunto de personas a las que une
no una propiedad, sino –justamente– un deber, una deuda. Unidas no por un
mas, sino por un menos, una falta. O una modalidad carencial para quien esta
“afectado”, a diferencia de aquel que esta “exento” o “eximido”.23 Por ello, la
comunidad no puede pensarse como un cuerpo, una corporacion, una fusion de
individuos que de como resultado un individuo mas grande. “No es un modo
de ser ni de hacer del sujeto individual. (…) La comunidad lo empuja a tomar
contacto con lo que no es, con su nada.”24
Y citando a Rousseau, agrega: “La falta de relación entre sus miembros es
lo que hace posible la comunidad (…). De manera paradójica, de esta falta
resulta la inmediatez, transparencia e inocencia distintivas de la comunidad,
antes de que las mediaciones sucesivas de las que se compone la civilización
(lenguaje, poder, dinero, escritura, leyes) sobrevengan para alienarla, fragmentarla,
desnaturalizarla”.25 Segun estas definiciones, el concepto “comunidad”
no solamente permite, sino que auspicia la diferencia de sus miembros, ya que
en todos ellos reconoce la afectacion de la carencia, y frente a ella, todos –sin
excepcion– se convierten en dadores y beneficiarios del comun. No ciertamente
en busqueda de una virtual fusion, sino en responsables de desobligar una obligacion.
“Es el don que se da porque se debe dar y no se puede no dar (…). Es la
obligación contraída con otros, y requiere una adecuada desobligación.”26
Arendt piensa en un mundo, una comunidad, en la que viven juntos los
hombres, compartiendo lo que hay en comun. El mundo metaforizado por una
mesa que une, pero que tambien distancia. Que acerca, pero mantiene equidistantes
a sus integrantes. En ese mundo coexiste lo que hay en comun y lo que
es diferente, en cada uno y entre cada cual.
Vivir juntos en el mundo de cosas entre quienes lo tienen en común, como
una mesa está puesta entre aquellos que se sientan a ella. El mundo,
19 Ibid., pag. 25.
20 Ibid., pag. 22.
21 Ibid., pag. 23.
22 Ibid., pag. 25.
23 Ibid., pag. 29.
24 Ibid., pag. 32.
25 Ibid., pag. 91.
26 Ibid., pag. 28.
280 / Nuestra Memoria
como todo en medio (in between), relaciona y –al mismo tiempo– separa
a los hombres.27
Esto no agota el problema porque la distancia, entendida como la figura de
la comunidad, implica un segundo interrogante acerca del vinculo entre tal
diferencia y los sujetos que relaciona. .La diferencia esta fuera o dentro de los
sujetos? .Es tan solo el espacio que los separa, conservando su individualidad,
o lo que anula su individualidad, penetrandola y derribandola en cuanto tal?
En sintesis, .el limite pasa junto a los sujetos o por su interior?
El sujeto es un lugar determinado y vacio que puede ser llenado –efectivamente–
por individuos diversos.
Es en este contexto y bajo esta contingencia que la pensadora Arendt introdujo
el concepto de “paria”, en referencia a la anomala operacion que cerco el
pensamiento y la participacion de los intelectuales y del comun de la gente de
esa epoca y esa latitud.
El paria es resultado del precario equilibrio entre la sociedad y el Estado,
sobre el que descanso social y politicamente la Nacion-Estado que produjo una
ley que goberno el ingreso de judios en la sociedad.
Esta realidad demostro que ninguna de sus clases se hallaba preparada para
conceder la igualdad social y que solo serian admitidas excepciones dentro del
pueblo judio.
Si los judios deseaban este genero de relacion, trataban de “ser y no ser
judios”.
Se les exigia que estuviesen educados como el resto y que, aunque no se
comportaran como un “judio ordinario”, fuesen y produjeran algo fuera de lo
“ordinario”, ya que eran judios. Los que propugnaban la emancipacion exigian
asimilacion.28
La emancipacion moderna significo nuevas condiciones de exclusion.29
Frente a dicha exclusion surgen –segun Arendt– diversos modos de jugar el rol
de paria: “paria conciente”, “paria advenedizo o parnevu” y “paria inocente”.
Los “parias concientes” han propuesto diversas maneras de salir de esta
carencia de mundo, de este acosmismo ligado solo a la filantropia.
Su actitud es la de sentir gratitud por el don recibido, por el presente de la
judeidad o de cualquier otra diferencia y tomarla como propia, tener iniciativa;
re-presentarla, ponerla en juego a traves de la palabra y la accion en un contexto
donde se encuentran los otros y las otras.30
27 Ibid., pag. 137.
28 Arendt, Hannah. Los orígenes del antisemitismo. Madrid, Alianza, 1981, pag. 92.
29 Arendt, H., “Introduccion”, en Una revisión…, op. cit., pag. 19.
30 Ibid., pag. 15.
Las metáforas de la memoria / 281
Lazare es quien acuna el concepto de “paria conciente”, que intenta definir
la situacion de los judios emancipados, contraponiendola a la existencia inconsciente
de paria de las masas judias no emancipadas del Este.
El judio debia convertirse en un rebelde, en representante de un pueblo
oprimido que asocia su lucha por la libertad con la lucha por la libertad nacional
y social de todos los pueblos oprimidos de Europa: “Debemos luchar contra
el judío parvenu, es necesario que lo rechacemos como una porquería que nos
envenena”.31
Lazare queria que el judio se defendiese como paria, pues cada criatura tiene
el deber de resistir a la opresion de todos los poderes hostiles –los del entorno
y el de los propios hermanos acaudalados–.32
Benjamin, a traves de una combinacion de decisiones y circunstancias, se
acerco mas a la figura del “paria conciente” de Lazare, opuesta a las figuras judias
relacionadas con el paria: el shéimihl (miserable), el shnórer (pordiosero),
el parnevu (arribista).33
El objetivo programatico, como intelectual revolucionario, era para el –en
efecto– el traicionar a su clase de origen, y su verdadera trayectoria fue la del
gentilhombre.34
Para Benjamin, el judio ciertamente no debe hablar. .Acaso deberia tomar
parte en la conversacion? Como miembro de una minoria que no tenia voz legitima
en los asuntos nacionales, el judio aleman es un menor de edad; literalmente,
un “sin boca”.35
En la fantástica autobiografía de Agesilaus Santander, Benjamin da
cuenta de la estrategia asimilacionista de sus padres, que fracasan ya
que en el cambio de un seudónimo por otro. Él llega al de “Scholem”,
puesto que –según el autor– nunca sería el seudónimo utilizado por un
judío.36
Segun Arendt, el autor de Agesilaus Santander juega con variaciones autobiograficas
en su mas amplio proyecto de “refundir y rehusar” la teologia. Al
rescribir traviesamente su genealogia, se sale de la alternativa bloqueada entre
asimilacion y regreso al redil. El hijo de sus padres se ha convertido en escritor,
pero no en el que ellos tenian en mente.37
31 Arendt, Hannah. La tradición oculta. Buenos Aires, Paidos, 2004, pag. 58.
32 Ibid., pag. 59.
33 Wohlfarth, I., op. cit., pag. 57.
34 Ibid., pag. 64.
35 Ibid., pag. 76
36 Idem.
37 Ibid., pag. 79.
282 / Nuestra Memoria
Ahora, si tomamos el ejemplo de Kafka, lo que lo distingue de Benjamin y
otros es una nueva y agresiva forma de reflexion. Sin arrogancia, sin superioridad
ironica (Heine), sin la astucia inocente del hombrecito apurado (Chaplin),
el heroe de Kafka se enfrenta a la sociedad con una agresion conciente y deliberada.
Para las autoridades, el es una casualidad burocratica y su existencia
ciudadana corre peligro de transcurrir entre “columnas de actas”. Por el habla
el judio, que no quiere sino sus derechos como ser humano: hogar, trabajo, familia,
ciudadania. Kafka describe a “K” como si solo hubiera uno en el mundo,
un unico judio. En eso atina en la realidad humana concreta. El aislamiento.38
Segun Deleuze y Guatari, ese ser paria al que estamos aludiendo en este
trabajo –“Fremde”–, extrano, se distingue del que propone Kafka; es como una
desterritorializacion absoluta, sin reterritorializacion compensatoria alguna.39
Podemos citar y agregar multiples ejemplos de personalidades que eligieron
mantener un hilo de conciencia y actitud alerta frente a los acontecimientos
que se sucedian. Herzl, quien puso la “cuestion judia” en la arena internacional.
Freud, quien habla de si mismo como uno que esta completamente alienado
de la religion de sus padres o de cualquier otra: “Incapaz de participar de los
ideales nacionalistas”, y sin embargo, alguien que nunca ha negado pertenecer
a su pueblo. Si se le preguntara que es lo que sigue siendo judio en el despues
de haber renunciado a mucho de lo que es comun a sus companeros judios,
responderia: “No mucho, probablemente lo esencial”. “Algún día será sujeto,
ciertamente, del entendimiento científico.”40
Gershom Scholem afirma: “Y la igualmente reductora y particularista inversión
de prioridades: ‘No hay algo judío que me sea ajeno’”.41
Tambien engrosarian esta lista numerosas figuras que alcanzarian renombre
despues de haber sobrevivido la experiencia de los campos: Bruno Bettelheim,
Primo Levi, quienes –a traves de su reflexiones– colaboraron en intentar allanar
el camino del acercamiento a la comprension del horror.
La tradicion de una minoria de judios que no han querido convertirse en advenedizos,
que prefirieron el “estatuto de parias concientes” (Rahel Varenhagen,
Scholem Aleijem, Lazare, Kafka). Todos exhibieron cualidades judias: el corazon
judio, la humanidad, el humor, la inteligencia desinteresada. Todas cualidades
de parias, segun Arendt.
“Paria advenedizo-parvenu”: Su actitud es la de negar lo dado; esto es, renunciar
a “las fibras que le constituyen”, con el fin de ser reconocido y poder
asimilarse.
38 Arendt, H., La tradición…, op. cit., pag. 67.
39 Wohlfarth, I., op. cit., pag. 82.
40 Ibid., pag. 55.
41 Ibid., pag. 37.
Las metáforas de la memoria / 283
La actitud del asimilado, la de negacion del don del presente, tiene un alto
precio. “Si uno quiere realmente asimilarse, no puede escoger desde afuera a
qué querría asimilarse, lo que le gusta y no (…). No hay asimilación si uno se
limita a abandonar su pasado, pero ignora el ajeno. En una sociedad que es
–en su conjunto– antisemita, sólo es posible asimilarse, asimilándose también
al antisemitismo.”42
Como el caso de Stefan Zweig, quien –a traves de la fama y el exito– parecia
haber logrado un lugar de arraigo y considerabase una excepcion.43
Como el senor Cohn de Berlin, que habia sido siempre un 150% aleman.
En 1933 paso a Praga. Paso a Viena. Llego a Paris en un mal momento, y nunca
obtuvo un permiso de residencia regular. Habiendo adquirido ya una destreza
en confundir deseos con realidades, se nego a tomarse en serio las medidas administrativas,
convencido de que pasaria su futura vida en Francia.
Mientras no pueda hacerse a la idea de ser lo que –de hecho– es, un
judío, nadie puede pronosticar todos los cambios por los que tendrá que
pasar.44
Segun Isaac Deutscher, el “paria parvenu” es el judio no judio (incluye, entre
otros, a Marx y Trotzky), que rastrea a partir de Spinoza y coloca bajo el
amparo de “Ajer”, el extranjero o el otro, quien –de acuerdo con el midrash
(leyenda)– abandono un dia la comunidad judia, para jamas regresar.45
Benjamin describe a Ernst Bloch como otro tipo de personalidad. Alguien que
muestra sus tesoros en un area demolida por un terremoto, en vez de hacer que
sus tapetes persas se corten para hacer cobijas y sus lujosos vasos se fundan.46
Benjamin escribio, en 1929, respecto de las relaciones judeo-alemanas: “Tres
veces desconfía de toda reconciliación: entre clases, entre naciones, entre individuos”.
Lo mismo fue valido para la simbiosis judeoalemana. Una forma de
enganarse a uno mismo, que confundio los deseos con la realidad, para mejor
negar la realidad del antisemitismo.47
Otro ejemplo de judio advenedizo fue Benjamin Disraeli, quien se preocupo
mas apasionada y descaradamente que cualquier otro intelectual judio de ser
admitido en circulos cada vez mas elevados de la sociedad; fue el unico entre
ellos que descubrio el secreto de preservar la suerte, ese milagro natural del
estado de paria, y que supo –desde el principio– que no habia que humillarse
42 Arendt, H., “Introduccion”, en Una revisión…, op. cit., pag. 15.
43 Ibid., pag. 24.
44 Ibid., pag. 11.
45 Wohlfarth, I., op. cit., pag. 56.
46 Ibid., pag. 57.
47 Ibid., pag. 61.
284 / Nuestra Memoria
para remontarse desde lo alto hasta lo mas alto. Disraeli, que nunca nego su
ser judio, sentia una admiracion por todo lo judio a la que solo igualaba su ignorancia
sobre todo lo judio. La mezcla de orgullo e ignorancia acerca de estas
materias resultaba caracteristica de todos los judios asimilados.48
Todos los defectos judios –la falta de tacto, la estulticia politica, los complejos
de inferioridad y la mezquindad con el dinero– son caracteristicas de los
advenedizos.49
“Paria ingenuo/inocente”: La inocencia, lejos de ser una cualidad, es una
posicion en relacion con la accion que convierte a los individuos en altamente
vulnerables, ya que no disponen de clave alguna para interpretar lo que les
sucede. La situacion de inocencia a la que se ven reducidos, tal como se refleja
en los relatos de los supervivientes, es absolutamente inhumana. Cancela toda
distincion en el grupo de los inocentes, impidiendoles entender que relacion
tiene lo que les ocurre con lo que hayan podido hacer o dejar de hacer. Tendrian
mejor que ser culpables de algo.50
En esta tipologia, Arendt incluye a Heine: “Es tan inocente y tan puro, es
tan poco lo que quiere lograr en este mundo, que incluso la gloria no es para él
sino señal de su condición de sheimihl. Trae las ganas de broma y risa”.51 “Es
el único judío alemán que hubiera realmente podido decir de sí mismo que era
alemán y judío, ambas cosas a la vez.”
Chaplin tambien es considerado por Arendt un paria inocente, conocido
como el “sospechoso”.
“Lo que une a las figuras del ‘sospechoso’ y el ‘sheimihl’ es la inocencia.” La
inocencia no es un rasgo de caracter, sino expresion de la peligrosa tension que
siempre supone aplicar leyes generales a fechorias individuales.52
Bertolt Brecht escribio:
Todos saben que es un hombre. Tiene un nombre.
Camina por la calle. Se sienta en un bar.
Todos pueden ver su rostro. Todos pueden oír su voz.
Y una mujer le lava la camisa. Y una mujer le peina los cabellos.
¡Pero matadlo! ¿Por qué no hacerlo?
Si nunca fue nada más que
el hacedor de su mala acción o
el hacedor de su buena acción.53
48 Arendt, H., Los orígenes…, op. cit., pag. 109.
49 Arendt, H., Una revisión…, op. cit., pag. 14.
50 Arendt, H., “Introduccion”, en Una revisión…, op. cit., pag. 23.
51 Arendt, H., La tradición…, op. cit., pag. 53.
52 Ibid., pag. 63.
53 Arendt, Hannah. Hombres en tiempos de oscuridad. Barcelona, Gedisa, 1990, pag. 260.
Las metáforas de la memoria / 285
De este poema podemos extraer una ensenanza. La misma nos remite a la
arbitrariedad con que los hechos se sucedian, y frente a ellos, poco importaba
el buen accionar o la trasgresion. La “no logica” era la logica.
Las diversas modalidades de accion, expuestas en las diferentes actitudes
de los parias, no estan vinculadas a situaciones por demas disimiles: a todos
ellos les alcanzo la irracionalidad de la epoca del terror. Absolutamente todos
estaban a merced de la volatilidad de la contingencia.
Uno podia entender que determinado accionar era conducente y beneficioso
para sortear la trampa del victimario, pero esa eleccion podia ser exactamente
la contraria a la esperada, lo que devenia –de inmediato– en el fin de elucubraciones
y calculos. Era el fin.
Son sus posturas eticas, su critica o la falta de conciencia las que permiten
identificar el lugar de cada uno en ese mundo.
En la introduccion adelante que intentaria relacionar el concepto de “paria”,
que Arendt desarrolla en diferentes parrafos de su produccion, con un aspecto
particular, presente en unos de los rituales mas antiguos del pueblo judio.
Para la mejor comprension del mismo sintetizare lo mejor posible dicho
ritual y su procedencia.
El pueblo judio rememora y celebra anualmente la epopeya de la liberacion
de la grey de manos del faraon egipcio. Es una celebracion de gran peso en la
constitucion de este pueblo como tal, ya que de ahi en mas –por un lado– asume
un estatus de libertad en pleno derecho y –por otro– es acreedor de la normativa
de su cultura plasmada en la Torá, las Tablas de la Ley.
Esta festividad tiene varios elementos significativos. En primer lugar, se la
celebra en el hogar, en familia. Es una celebracion que se distingue de otras,
siendo que es oficiada por el adulto varon, que es quien la conduce.
El segundo elemento es que la celebracion tiene un orden prefijado, un séder.
Este mismo nombre es con el que se denomina al rito: “Séder de Pésaj”, Orden
de Pésaj.54
Este orden esta tipificado y registrado en la “Hagadá de Pésaj”, un texto
desde el cual se sigue la secuencia del rito.
La palabra “Hagadá” posee, en hebreo, el doble significado de “narracion”
y “leyenda”. Sin embargo, “narracion” y “leyenda” no son conceptos incompatibles
ni excluyentes. “Narracion” sugiere un relato veridico y exacto, pero
“leyenda” va mas alla de lo que es la verdad simple y franca, para elevarnos al
nivel de la moraleja y de la ensenanza. De ese modo nos hace ver lo que hay
oculto detras de la mera descripcion de los hechos y de los acontecimientos. La
Hagadá es el tradicional relato acerca de la salida de Egipto, repetido una y otra
vez, ano tras ano y generacion tras generacion.
54 Hagadá de Pésaj tradicional. Jerusalem, Koren Publishers, 1989.
286 / Nuestra Memoria
Los ninos son el corazon de la fiesta de Pésaj. Desde pequenos se los inicia
en el ritual de la Hagadá, con el objetivo de que cuando esos ninos se transformen
en padres, tambien leeran y explicaran la Hagadá a sus hijos. De ese modo,
el ciclo quedara perpetuado. “Y le dirás a tu hijo ese día: ‘Es a causa de lo que
hizo conmigo el Eterno, cuando salí de Egipto’” (Éxodo 13:8). Este versiculo
da origen y justificacion a la Hagadá, el relato de la liberacion del pueblo de
Israel, el cual constituye el punto crucial de la festividad de Pésaj. La Hagadá es
ensenanza, transmision de valores y conjuncion de generaciones presentes, pasadas
y futuras; es compromiso en el sentido de la responsabilidad individual
y colectiva y de un exigente concepto acerca de la dignidad del ser humano,
propia del judaismo. Como dijimos, en este Séder de Pésaj los ninos tienen un
rol preponderante. Y es por ello que se los estimula a participar activamente y
a mantenerse despiertos hasta la finalizacion del encuentro. Sabiendo que hay
diversas topologias de hijos es que la misma Hagadá indica, sugiere y propone
modalidades de conducta y actitud diferentes, de acuerdo con como sea cada
nino. Leemos en la Hagadá que hay cuatro tipos de hijos sentados a la mesa:
Uno es sabio, uno es malvado, uno es ingenuo y uno es quien no sabe preguntar.
El sabio pregunta: “¿Qué dice esto? ¿Cuáles son los testimonios,
las leyes y los juicios que el Señor, nuestro Dios, ordenó?”. Y contéstale
tú, de acuerdo con los preceptos de Pésaj: “No se permite comer después
de la comida de Pésaj sobrecomida”. El perverso pregunta: “¿Qué
servicio es éste para vosotros?” ¡Para vosotros y no para él! Y porque se
excluye de la comunidad, reniega del principio del judaísmo. Dile: “Es
por ello que Dios me hizo estos prodigios cuando salí de Egipto. A mí, no
a ti. Si hubieses estado allí, no te habría liberado”. El ingenuo pregunta:
“¿Qué es eso?”. Y contéstale: “Con la fuerza de la mano nos ha sacado
Dios de Egipto, de la casa de los esclavos”. Y al que no sabe preguntar
tienes que iniciarlo tú, según se ha dicho: “Y dirás a tu hijo, aquel día:
‘Es por ello que Dios me hizo los prodigios cuando salí de Egipto’”.
Hasta aqui, el sucinto relato de la consistencia del ritual.
Podriamos comenzar relacionando la centralidad que tiene la mesa en dicho
ritual con la metafora de la mesa con la que Arendt simboliza al mundo. En la
mesa de Pésaj, que –por cierto– no es un aspecto menor, se intenta dar testimonio
de una epopeya, se la dramatiza desde el relato, las bendiciones y los canticos
ancestrales. La mesa reune a todas las generaciones presentes, y cada una
tiene un rol significativo. Ninguna es prescindente. Tambien estan presentes las
generaciones pasadas, ya que no solo se las evoca, sino que se exhorta a que los
participantes se identifiquen con ellos, como si ellos mismos hubieran salido
de Egipto. Esa mesa reune y tambien hace referencia a la diferencia de estar alli
Las metáforas de la memoria / 287
sentados, recordando, y no esclavizados. No olvida, los recuerda celebrando
la libertad en libertad. Arendt escribe: “Y ciertamente podemos acentuar lo
que los relaciona o los separa, pero sin la mesa, sin un espacio donde singularizarnos,
quedaríamos comprimidos –unos contra otros– en un solo modelo
de judeidad, reducidos a lo dado. (…) Hay un mundo entre los hombres, en la
medida en que están –al mismo tiempo– separados (son plurales) y entrelazados
(no aislados), y por ello, el acosmismo o atrofia del mundo puede resultar
tanto de la absoluta separación o atomización como de la fusión”.55 Esta mesa
de Pésaj no es cualquier mesa. Es una mesa especial, que tiene un orden, un
séder. Ese orden permite que lo prioritario, que es la transmision del espiritu
de libertad y justicia de un pueblo, no se diluya. Permite, ademas, que todos los
participantes sean protagonistas de la experiencia de liberacion y de constitucion
del pueblo. Segun Arendt, “pueblo” es –al mismo tiempo– lo “dado” y el
fruto de organizarse a partir de intereses comunes. “Pertenecer a un grupo es
–antes que nada– una condición natural. Pero en un segundo sentido –es decir,
formando un grupo organizado–, es una cosa enteramente distinta. Quiere decir
‘participar’”.56 Como vemos, la tradicion valoriza el estar unidos alrededor
de una mesa, con un orden y con participacion plena, aun la de los mas pequenos.
Un elemento es el que –a mi entender– sobresale en todo este rito. Y es la
alusion a los cuatro hijos, a quienes va dirigida la historia.
Ahora bien, tenemos cuatro hijos, que son –naturalmente– integrantes de
esta familia, de esta comunidad. Cada uno de ellos asume un rol propio, que
lo diferencia del resto de los hijos. Ese rol que desempena en ese espacio es un
lugar que asume en dicha mesa, en esa comunidad. La actitud que juegan desde
cada lugar los acerca o los aleja –segun sea su comportamiento– de lo que acontece
en esa mesa. El modo de vincularse con lo que en esa mesa ocurre provoca
diversos efectos y respuestas. Pero en modo alguno uno de ellos queda excluido
como consecuencia de su actitud. Podriamos, ahora, ver si entre estas tipologias
de hijos se encuentra alguna relacion con las diferentes derivaciones de parias
que planteo Arendt. En la Hagadá se nombra primero al hijo sabio, el jajam. Su
sabiduria consiste en estar y sentirse involucrado en lo que alli acontece. Sus
preguntas son atinadas y pertinentes. Toma la palabra, interrogando el acontecer.
Sus sentidos estan aguzados y su palabra es clara. Demuestra conocimiento
previo, y hasta pareceria que ya cuenta con la respuesta que recibira. Los parias
concientes, que Arendt nos presento, tambien sienten gratitud por el don recibido,
por disfrutar de su judeidad. Tienen multiples formas de manifestarlo y
dan curso a ellas. Estos parias, lejos de actuar arrogantemente con sus congeneres,
re-presentan al resto, toman la palabra, asumen la representacion de su
55 Arendt, H., “Introduccion”, en Una revisión…, op. cit., pag. 22.
56 Ibid., pag. 17.
288 / Nuestra Memoria
legado. Sin superioridad ironica, si astucia inocente. Preguntan y cuestionan la
ley, los preceptos (en la Hagadá), los derechos y a la propia Justicia (en la vida).
No reniegan de su pasado, ni de su pertenencia (Herzl, Scholem, Freud). A traves
de ellos se expresa “un corazon judio”. Lazare, testigo del juicio a Dreyfus,
a medida que se fue encontrando con el odio de las masas se dio cuenta de que
era un paria y acepto el reto. Unico entre los defensores de Dreyfus que ocupo
su puesto como un judio conciente, en la lucha por la justicia, en general, y por
el pueblo judio, en particular.57 A este hijo se le responde desde la misma altura
de su pregunta. Pertinente y justamente.
El perverso, el hijo malvado, rashá, tambien interroga. Su pregunta esta formulada
desde otra vereda, y no otro extremo de la mesa. Se ubica fuera del
acontecer del rito y tambien de la narracion. Dice: “.Que servicio es este para
vosotros?”, no “para nosotros”. Se autoexcluye, se aleja, re-niega del principio
del judaismo, en general, y del suyo, en particular.
Sin embargo, aunque aparentemente indigno de ser considerado, sigue ocupando
un lugar en la mesa, y no el ultimo. Y ese lugar es al lado del sabio, que
es el mas apto y el que posee la fortaleza de despertar en el malvado la chispa de
la pertenencia. La consigna es no resignarse a su alejamiento, no renunciar a su
presencia, sino aceptarlo y ayudarlo.58 Tambien en Arendt el parvenu niega su
don. Renuncia a las fibras que lo constituyen. Hay una decision anticipada de
no querer ser parte. Es posible la intencion de querer negarse, mas, .es posible
un resultado exitoso? Arendt escribe que: “Los judíos asimilados lograron una
hazaña sin precedentes: aún probando todo el tiempo su carácter no judío, consiguieron
continuar siendo judíos a pesar de todo”.59 .Como lograr despojarse
de su don? .Sera que imaginan que otra mesa los cobijara, que otra comunidad
los albergara? Y si no es una mesa, otra, y otra. .Como el senor Cohn? Resulta
ser que Marx es conocido como “el judio Marx”. Arendt, escribe: “Ha venido a
convertirse en un distintivo de los judíos asimilados el hecho de ser incapaces
de distinguir entre amigo y enemigo, entre cumplido o insulto, así como el sentirse
halagados cuando un antisemita les asegura que no se refiere a ellos, que
hay excepciones, judíos excepcionales. Los acontecimientos han demostrado
que el ‘judío que es una excepción’ es más judío que excepción”.60
El inocente, el tam, pregunta –desde su simpleza– “.que es eso?” y no “.que
es esto?”, como el sabio. Eso es aquello que el inocente desconoce. .Y por que
lo desconoce? .No estuvo antes incluido? .No se le ha respondido antes a su
interrogacion? La figura de este hijo remite –en mi interpretacion– a que las
57 Ibid., pag. 54.
58 Pagina web del Seminario Rabinico Latinoamericano.
59 Arendt, H., Una revisión…, op. cit., pag. 13.
60 Ibid., pag. 37.
Las metáforas de la memoria / 289
respuestas que se le deben dar deben ser contundentes, a que las acciones que
tengan por objetivo el afan de transmision deben ser claras, precisas y oportunas.
A este hijo se le responde con el versiculo: “Con la fuerza de la mano nos
ha sacado Dios de Egipto, de la casa de los esclavos”. Ya que en este versiculo
se sintetiza claramente el motivo de celebracion y union de la mesa. Ahora,
puede ocurrir que de no haber respuestas contundentes, esta inocencia se convierta
en ignorancia, y esta ignorancia en perversidad, y de alli, en asimilacion.
Arendt escribe en relacion a Lazare y a Herzl: “Ambos se mantenían al margen
de la tradición, ambos –como intelectuales– estaban alejados de las estrechas
camarillas provincianas, ya que habíanse desarrollado en el marco de la sociedad
gentil. Y sin embargo, ambos eran su producto natural, era ese gueto
el lugar del que ambos habían escapado, cuando se les empujó de nuevo a él.
No podían hallar un lugar en el mundo, si el pueblo judío no se constituía en
nación”.61
Hay otros pensadores que tambien aluden al fracaso de la transmision y
que –afortunadamente– por diversas vias lograron pasar de la inocencia a la
conciencia. Uno de ellos es Kafka: “El de una generación perdida, cuyos padres
fracasaron tanto al transmitir la fe de sus padres como al romper de manera
franca con ella (Carta al padre, 1919)”.62 “Se aferran todavía con las patas
traseras al judaísmo del padre, y con sus patas delanteras no encuentran suelo
nuevo.”63 Benjamin escribe: “La náusea más general de toda tradición y, concomitantemente,
de toda autoridad es esta consistencia de la verdad –verdad
en su consistencia hagádica–, la que se ha perdido”.64 Arendt escribe: “El desarrollo
de una cultura judía, o su ausencia, no dependerá –de ahora en adelante–
de circunstancias que vayan mas allá del control del pueblo judío, sino
de su propia voluntad”.
El inocente no esta exento de responsabilidad. Debe participar, cuestionarse,
y ello devendra en pertenencia. La Hagadá incluye a un cuarto hijo, que es:
“quien no sabe preguntar”. A el hay que iniciarlo en el conocimiento. Decirle,
contarle, para –a traves de el– ser dicho. .En que se diferencia este hijo del hijo
inocente? El inocente pregunta. Este hijo aun no tiene capacidad de pregunta,
de testimoniar sobre su lugar. Agamben escribe: “El sujeto de la enunciación
está hecho íntegramente de discurso y por el discurso; pero precisamente por
esto, en el discurso no puede decir nada, no puede hablar”.65 “La enunciación
no se refiere al texto enunciado, sino a su tener lugar, y el individuo puede
61 Ibid., pag. 55.
62 Arendt, H., Hombres…, op. cit., pag. 30.
63 Ibid., pag. 24.
64 Ibid., pag. 45. El autor se refiere a la preponderancia del dogma por sobre la religiosidad.
65 Agamben, G., Lo que queda…, op. cit., pag. 123.
290 / Nuestra Memoria
poner en funcionamiento la lengua sólo a condición de reconocerse en el acontecimiento
mismo del decir y no en lo que se dice.”66 Quien no sabe preguntar,
de la mesa de Pésaj, podria incluirse en la historia contemporanea como
la memoria de aquellos que no pudieron testimoniar acerca de su lugar en la
mesa, pero que aun estan presentes, en nuestras propias preguntas y cuestionamientos.
Escribe Primo Levi: “Hurbinek no puede testimoniar porque no tiene
lengua. Y sin embargo, testimonia a través de estas palabras mías”. Tampoco el
superviviente puede testimoniar integramente, decir la propia lengua. El testimonio
es el encuentro entre dos imposibilidades de testimoniar, que la lengua
–si es que pretende testimoniar– debe ceder su lugar a una “no lengua”, mostrar
la imposibilidad de testimoniar. No basta, pues, para testimoniar, con llevar la
lengua hasta el propio no sentido, hasta la pura indeterminacion de las letras;
es preciso que este sonido, despojado de sentido, sea –a su vez– voz de algo o
de alguien que, por razones muy diferentes, no puede testimoniar. La laguna
que constituye la lengua humana se desploma sobre ella misma para dar paso
a otra imposibilidad de testimoniar: la del que no tiene lengua.67 La relevancia
que tiene este lugar en la mesa es que se permite la laguna, el vacio, de la palabra,
que en esta ocasion no puede expresarse, pero que cabe la posibilidad que
asuma articulacion de sonido en otra instancia generacional.
Conclusión
En la introduccion adelante que intentaria relacionar el concepto de “paria”,
tan presente en la obra de Arendt, con el elemento de los cuatro tipos de hijos
que el ritual de Pésaj nombra. Efectivamente, considero que hay un hilo
conductor entre ambas metaforas. Me surge interrogarme acerca de si la epopeya
de la salida del pueblo judio de Egipto fue desde los remotos tiempos
celebrada, o si con el correr de los tiempos fue in crescendo como paradigma
de liberacion de este pueblo. Y si es asi, podriamos adherir a la postura que
sostiene que aquellos hechos traumaticos van tomando, con el tiempo, mayor
fuerza y se convierten en arquetipicos y paradigmaticos. Esto vale para la
vivencia tanto personal como cultural. Las diversas maneras de aproximarse
a la experiencia del exilio y de la liberacion de Egipto persisten –de alguna
manera– en el metalenguaje transmitido de generacion en generacion. Y frente
a dicho hecho, obviamente hubo diversas modalidades de aproximacion, identificacion
o –por el contrario– indiferencia. Son, en definitiva, estructuras de
personalidad que se ponen en juego en todos sus matices. Arendt escribe: “La
vitalidad de una nación se mide en función del recuerdo vivo de su historia.
66 Ibid., pag. 122.
67 Ibid., pag. 39.
Las metáforas de la memoria / 291
Nosotros, los judíos, propendemos a tener una perspectiva histórica invertida.
Cuanto más alejados del presente están los acontecimientos, con tanta mayor
viveza, claridad y precisión aparecen. Semejante inversión de la perspectiva
histórica significa que en nuestra conciencia política no queremos asumir la
responsabilidad por el pasado inmediato y que –al igual que nuestros historiadores–
queremos refugiarnos en períodos pasados, que nos hacen sentir
seguros en cuanto a las consecuencias”.68 Fueron estos cuatro hijos quienes,
voluntaria o involuntariamente, consciente o inconscientemente, preservaron
la memoria de la epopeya hasta estos dias. .Les cupo a todos ellos la responsabilidad,
y como la asumieron?
La insistencia en relatarles a los cuatro de la Hagadá reside en que: “La comunidad
es un bien, un valor, una esencia que se puede perder y reencontrar como
algo que nos perteneció en otro tiempo y que podría volver a pertenecernos”.69
Todos, los cuatro hijos son merecedores de ocupar un lugar en nuestra comunidad,
por derecho propio. Ellos deberan compartir y responsabilizarse –a su
vez– del don. “La sucesión de generaciones puede ser una garantía natural de
la continuidad de la historia, pero no ciertamente una garantía de progreso.
Puesto que somos los hijos de nuestros padres y los nietos de nuestros abuelos,
sus errores pueden perseguirnos hasta la tercera o cuarta generación.”70
68 Arendt, H., Una revisión…, op. cit., pag. 37.
69 Esposito, R., op. cit., pag. 23.
70 Arendt, H., Una revisión…, op. cit., pag. 38.

El Holocausto en
documentos
Protocolos de los debates internos del
aparato nazi
Notas introductorias: Abraham Zylberman

En el centro de la ideología nazi está el concepto de “raza”: esta concepción
sostiene que la raza es la fuerza motriz de cualquier acontecimiento histórico,
incluyendo la formación de Estados y la creación cultural. A su vez, la
raza se define biológicamente casi como una sustancia hemática, determinando
a los pueblos y a los individuos no sólo en cuanto a su aspecto físico
exterior, sino también respecto de sus funciones culturales y espirituales, y
diferenciándolos –básicamente– en grupos jerárquicos de pueblos de mayor
o menor valor, los pueblos creadores de cultura y los carentes de ella. Por esta
razón había que mantener a la raza pura, sin contaminaciones. La infestación
era producto del contacto con la raza inferior, la judía. En septiembre de
1935, poco más de un año después de la muerte del presidente Hindenburg y
de la concentración del poder (Cancillería y Presidencia) en manos de Hitler,
fueron promulgadas las “Leyes de Nuremberg”. Su importancia radicó en:
1. Cobró validez legislativa una situación que ya existía de hecho.
2. Fue aceptado oficialmente el principio racial en la ley germana.
3. La política antijudía ulterior tuvo –a partir de entonces– una base
jurídica.
Los siguientes documentos han sido extraidos de: Arad, Ytzhak-Gutman,
Israel-Margaliot, Abraham (edit.): El Holocausto en documentos. Seleccion
de documentos sobre la destruccion de los judios de Alemania y Austria,
Polonia y la Union Sovietica. Jerusalen, Yad Vashem, 1996.
* En: Reichsgesetzblatt I, 1935, pag. 1.146. En: op. cit., pp. 83-84.

Popkin, R., 1998. The Excommunicant. Review of The God of Spinoza: A Philosophical Study by Mason, R. and Spinoza, Liberalism and the Question of Jewish Identity by Smith, S. London Review of Books [Online] vol. 20 no. 20 pp. 38-42. Available from http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20/n20/richard-popkin/the-excommunicant [Accessed 24 April 2011].

The Excommunicant
Richard Popkin
The God of Spinoza: A Philosophical Study by Richard Mason
Cambridge, 272 pp, £35.00, May 1997, ISBN 0 521 58162 1
Spinoza, Liberalism and the Question of Jewish Identity by Steven Smith
Yale, 270 pp, £21.00, June 1997, ISBN 0 300 06680 5
Shortly after the end of World War Two, a young American professor submitted an article to a leading philosophical journal, explaining a difficult point in one of Spinoza’s arguments. In short order he received his manuscript back with the news, written on it by hand, that ‘we are not now and never will be interested in Spinoza.’ Spinoza had been dropped from the Anglo-American canon.

The positivists regarded him as one of the worst examples of a metaphysician. For Spinoza, God or Nature is everything and is everywhere, and whatever is, is an aspect of God or is in God. God is the cause of whatever takes place. Whatever happens follows necessarily from the nature of God, and nothing can be different than it is. Spinoza made it clear that he was not talking of the Judaeo-Christian deity, but a purely philosophical being. He then worked out a stoic-like ethical system in which the highest good for man is to see the world from the aspect of eternity, and to achieve the intellectual love of God. As Richard Mason reminds us, Spinoza’s neglect of epistemology made him of little interest to those who insisted that the problem of knowledge as set out by Descartes defined what philosophy was properly about. Spinoza found a little room for that problem only at the end of the second book of the Ethics. A decade ago, when I offered a course on Spinoza at UCLA, I was told it was years since one had been given. A senior colleague told me he had never read Spinoza, but knew he could not be all bad since he had been expelled from the Amsterdam Synagogue.

This attitude is now dated. We have recently been getting much new information about Spinoza’s background, the context in which he worked out his philosophy, and his influence. There is now an international journal, Studia Spinoza, and Spinoza societies exist in various Western countries. Above all, two new English-language editions of his writings are now appearing, one from Princeton, translated by Edwin Curley, of the entire corpus, the other from Hackett, translated by Samuel Shirley, of the Ethics, the Theologico-Political Tractatus and the Letters.

Much new material has also become available about the Jewish community of Amsterdam in Spinoza’s day, about events connected with his excommunication, his involvement with various radical Christian groups, the writings of his Latin teacher, a revolutionary ex-Jesuit, and about his place in the intellectual world of the time. The old picture of the solitary philosopher devoting his life to the pursuit of truth is now being replaced by a very much richer one.

These two new books focus on Spinoza’s theological and religious views. They seek in opposite ways to show the great significance of the Tractatus. Richard Mason starts from the Ethics, then carefully expounds Spinoza’s theological metaphysics, going on to interpret his critique of existing religions and his justification for complete religious toleration. Steven Smith starts from Spinoza’s role as the first secular Jew (after his excommunication), and the way it is reflected both in his critique of religion, especially Judaism, and in his political theory.

In both books, the excommunication of 1656 is the turning point, when Spinoza rejected his Jewish heritage and stepped into modernity. This is an event we now know much more about than we did. It was not a clear-cut case of rigid Orthodox Jews throwing out a free-thinking rebel. Indeed, it is not at all obvious why Spinoza was excommunicated. Details uncovered by the late I.S. Révah show that in 1659, three years after the excommunication, Spinoza attended a theological discussion group in Amsterdam, along with another former member of the synagogue, Juan de Prado, at which he is reported to have said: ‘God exists, but only philosophically.’

In 1656, three people had been accused of heterodoxy: Spinoza, Juan de Prado and Daniel Ribera, all accused of teaching questionable views in their Sunday school classes. (One can date the point at which Spinoza became unhappy with the synagogue from the records of his financial contributions, which had been substantial until one week in 1655 when they dropped to one cent.) The synagogue apparently did what it could to get the three miscreants to recant and apologise. Ribera just disappeared. Prado was a doctor and had been a Catholic theology student in Spain, where he was said to have been a deist, whatever that might then have meant. The synagogue leaders wanted to resettle Prado and his family if he did not recant his heterodoxy; they offered to drop the charges against Spinoza if he would come to the High Holiday services, and keep quiet. Prado recanted, but Spinoza did not.

Recant what, however? No specific charges appear in the excommunication statement, which looks so forceful and fearsome, and reads as if the community really hated the young Spinoza, but was in fact a form statement. Back in the early days of the Amsterdam Jewish community, when they wanted to throw out an obnoxious member, they did not know how to do it. They sent the future Chief Rabbi, Saul Levi Mortiera, to get the advice of Venetian rabbis, who gave him the form of words. It appears that during the 17th century over two hundred and eighty members were excommunicated from the Amsterdam Spanish and Portuguese Jewish community, for non-payment of dues, failure to keep a marriage contract, insulting one of the Board of Directors, buying a chicken from an Ashkenazi butcher instead of a Sephardic one, and so on. Only five ideological cases are recorded. Almost all excommunications were withdrawn when the penitent paid a fine, and/or made promises of future good behaviour. Spinoza is one of the very few who did not recant, or get received back into the good graces of the community.

The old hagiographical picture is of the brilliant young Spinoza opposed by a community that wanted nothing to do with new ideas. The Amsterdam community was not like this, however. It consisted of people who had lived as Christians in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy and Belgium. Some had studied at higher educational institutions, and knew about the science, philosophy and theology taught in them. They tried to keep up their Iberian heritage by training students in similar subjects, and ran Spanish poetry societies and put on Spanish plays. Few had any Jewish training before coming to Amsterdam. The members of the Jewish community were also involved generally in business, and were well aware of the different beliefs held in the city.

It is hard to imagine what Spinoza could have said or thought that would be so shocking to these people, most of whom regarded the Amsterdam synagogue as a business club for Marranos returning to Judaism. The excommunication seems to have occurred in the midst of a crisis about how to take care of thousands of Jewish refugees from Brazil and from Eastern Europe. It was pronounced privately, in the office of the Chief Rabbi, without Spinoza being present. In fact, he had already left the community, and started on his new life, the excommunication being simply a way of acknowledging this. It did not shut him off from the world, maybe not even from the Jewish world, since he had friends among former and fringe Jews in the Netherlands. (There were many partial Jews in Amsterdam who attended the synagogue but were also involved with various churches.) Spinoza himself never brought up the issue of his excommunication. He told people he had left Amsterdam because somebody tried to murder him with a knife – he kept a coat which had knife holes in it, and showed it off to people. He lived peaceably in the Netherlands and eventually died of natural causes, in spite of his radical views.

The so-called ‘Jewish Question’, as to whether and how Jews could fit into a modern ‘secular’ state, was first raised in Amsterdam early in the 17th century, when Hugo Grotius was asked to define the legal status of the emerging Jewish community. His proposal, involving many restrictions on Jewish life, was never acted on; instead, a de facto agreement was reached, whereby Jews could live as legal residents provided they did not cause scandal, and did not require government aid for their indigent members. The local community was as emancipated as any Jewish group in the world at the time, but Jews were not Dutch citizens. They could participate in making policy as stockholders in the India companies, but not as citizens.

The arguments about Jewish emancipation went on in France and Germany from the end of the 18th century. The Jews living in the Netherlands were offered Dutch citizenship by the French Revolutionary army that conquered the territory. Two groups opposed giving the Jews citizenship, the orthodox Calvinists and the Jews themselves. The Calvinists insisted that the Jews had to remain just Jews in order to fulfil their Providential role in world history. The Jews expressed gratitude for their treatment in the Netherlands but did not wish to be Dutch citizens because they might have to leave at any moment if their Messiah arrived. So they opted for temporary residency rather than citizenship.

Discussion of the place of Jews in modern society hardly starts with Spinoza, except for his attempt to play down the significance of Jewish customs and practices in post-Biblical society, and his advocacy of toleration of all religious groups which accept that their role is to persuade their members to obey the laws of the state. Spinoza’s Tractatus-Theologico Politicus, which most likely grew out of his unpublished answer to the Synagogue, starts by arguing that there is no special religious knowledge, neither by prophecy nor miracles. The purported Providential history of the ancient Jews has to be understood in context. The Jews had escaped from Egypt and had no legal society. Moses formed one for them, and reinforced its claim on them by attributing his laws to God. The ancient Jewish state was based on theocratic beliefs, which can be understood and evaluated in terms of the circumstances of the time. Now, centuries later, it is just a curious ancient history, having no claims on the present world. Those who want to re-create a Hebrew Republic, like some of the Dutch Protestants, do not understand that the Biblical world is over and done with. The Bible is just a set of human documents which were written and preserved over time. What is binding in them is only what a rational person would comprehend as the basis for modern human society. Churches should realise that their function is to make people obey the laws of the state, and to tolerate everyone.

The real debates about Jewish emancipation began in 18th-century France and Germany, culminating in Napoleon’s calling a Sanhedrin to decide whether Jews could be law-abiding citizens in an Enlightenment state. Spinoza is not responsible for the fact that emancipation did not lead to the acceptance of Jews as political and social equals. It is perhaps in the United States that something close to what Spinoza envisaged has developed, beginning with the founding Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the form of which may have been influenced by the 1729 English translation of the Tractatus that was in Benjamin Franklin’s library, a collection used for reference by the framers of the Constitution.

Spinoza’s prospectus for a post-Jewish and post-Christian world was part of his plan for ending human servitude by inducing all those who can to live a rational, free life. The new rational religion he proposed in the Tractatus, needing no Scriptures, has only seven principles, relating to an acceptance of God’s existence, and the need to show charity and a love of one’s neighbours. If this became the religion of the state, then everyone should be accepted as equal, even those who still adhered to Jewish or Christian religious groups, provided these inculcated obedience to the state and charity to others. Had Spinoza’s liberal state come into being, would there have been any ‘Jewish Question’?

Smith tries to make too much of Spinoza as the father or inspirer of Jewish emancipation, and also lends too much weight to his probably ironic statement in the Tractatus that if the Jews have not been made too effeminate by circumcision and by emulation of their neighbours, God might someday redeem them by re-establishing them in their homeland. Thus, Smith contends, Spinoza became the first political Zionist.

The re-establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine loomed large in 17th-century thought. Millenarians and Messianists like Isaac La Peyrère, John Dury and Peter Serrarius expected the recall of the Jews to Palestine any minute, where they would rebuild the Temple and set up a government. Arguments about whether they would return as Jews or as converts to Christianity were common. Menasseh ben Israel seemed to believe they would return as Jews; La Peyrère as Jewish Christians. Spinoza’s contribution to this debate is trivial. He was living in a world where Christian Millenarians both in England and the Netherlands were trying to establish a New Israel. Spinoza was worried by the violence that had accompanied the Puritan Revolution in England, and that the same might happen in his homeland. He had lived through the frenzy of the Sabbatai Zevi episode, when almost all Dutch Jews came to believe that the Messiah had arrived and would lead them back to the Holy Land.

Some Christians, too, believed this, and Christian political Zionists have played an important role, both then and now. Present-day ones, like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and Hal Lindsey, accept a Jewish state as a necessary pre-condition for the rebuilding of the Temple, to be followed by the return of Jesus and the conversion of the Jews. Spinoza, however, played hardly any role in the development of such thought. The current attempt in Israel to make him a Zionist hero reveals more about the political situation there than about Spinoza’s thought.

Mason says more than once that, where Spinoza’s metaphysical system is concerned, he is trying to ‘get it right’. Part of this involves making modern readers realise that he was not concerned with whether it is factually the case that God exists. Spinoza starts with God as a given, and then explicates what this implies. Mason goes on to reconcile this with his discussion of religion, principally in the Tractatus, where Judaism and Christianity, and their different conceptions of God, are among the main topics. Mason argues over and over that Spinoza has to be understood in the context of contemporary religious discussion.

Mason helps greatly to remove some misunderstandings by stressing that Spinoza was writing before the Enlightenment, for which he was a major source. The possibilities of agnosticism, deism and even atheism were just then being formulated, partly as a result of Spinoza’s own work. The idea that Moses, Jesus and Muhammad were frauds and fakers was soon to be known as ‘l’esprit de M. Spinosa’, even if it was not put about by him (though his good friend Henry Oldenburg worried about how to refute it). Even the radical consequences of his Biblical criticism only started to emerge in full after his death, in the writings of Father Richard Simon and Reimarus. Spinoza saw the Bible as growing out of the special political ‘religious’ circumstances of the ancient Hebrews. In order to understand how they had developed, the texts had to be studied historically, philologically and contextually. The end result of this kind of interpretation was to see the Bible as a literary-historical collection of documents, rather than as writings reporting divine truths.

The final aim of Spinoza’s examination of Hebrew history was political, to re-interpret it in order that a secular, tolerant state might come into being. His substitution of his own deconstructed Judaeo-Christianity for the avowed beliefs of existing churches and synagogues is intended to separate religion from the state. Only a rational religion can lead to the religious experience portrayed at the end of the Ethics, which views the world as if from eternity and teaches an intellectual love of God.

A footnote to this is that, in the Tractatus, Spinoza presents Jewish history and beliefs, and the significance of Jewish survival, in the way that would most jar his Jewish contemporaries in the Netherlands. Most of them had been raised in a world in which the Inquisition was the great enemy, and they tried in various ways to preserve some remnants of their Jewish roots. They all had friends and relatives who had been victims of the Inquisition. They had fled to Amsterdam because of fear of the Inquisition and because they wanted freely to express their Jewish feelings and beliefs. Henri Méchoulan has shown how Spinoza’s revisionism would have offended the sensibilities of the Marranos who had returned to Judaism, and who regarded this return to be of the greatest significance to themselves personally, as well as to Judaism and the future history of the world. Spinoza may have been tone-deaf to the Weltanschauung of his family and his original community.

It always surprises me when present-day interpreters of philosophers contend, as they often do, that they are the first properly to understand them, and can safely ignore earlier interpreters. In Spinoza’s case, by the end of the 17th century three now almost totally ignored interpretations had appeared which were to dominate evaluations of his thought for years afterwards: those of Pierre Bayle, Jacques Basnage and J.G. Wachter. Bayle debunked some of the hagiography and stressed Spinoza as a noble and systematic atheist, who, contrary to the claims of many theologians, was not corrupted by his disbelief, but was actually more moral than most Christians. Enlightenment readers came to see Spinoza in the light of Bayles’s interpretation. It was in keeping with this view that the manuscript entitled Les Trois Imposteurs, Moses, Jesus et Muhammed, ou l’esprit de M. Spinoza, appeared towards the end of the 17th century. There are well over two hundred copies of Les Trois Imposteurs in libraries all over Europe and America.

A quite different interpretation of Spinoza was offered by Bayle’s close friend, Jacques Basnage, in his Histoire des Juifs. Basnage sought to find out about Spinoza from people who had known him. In particular, he questioned a rabbi (probably Isaac Aboab, who had read out the excommunication sentence) and was told that Spinoza had plagiarised his ideas from the Kabbala, putting them into Cartesian dress to make it appear that he was original.

At first glance, Basnage’s interpretation seems preposterous, especially since Spinoza dismissed the Kabbalists as triflers. However, the same interpretation was offered by J.G. Wachter, who visited Amsterdam at the end of the 17th century. What caught the eye of both Basnage and Wachter was the partial similarity of Spinoza’s theories to those of Abraham Cohen Herrera, the great Neo-platonic kabbalist whose classic, Porta de Cielo, had appeared in Latin in 1677, at the same time as Spinoza’s Opera posthuma. Herrera, who had studied with Florentine Platonists and with one of Isaac Luria’s disciples, ended his life in Amsterdam, where he wrote his masterpiece. He belonged to the Spanish-Portuguese synagogue, and was the teacher of both Isaac Aboab and Menasseh ben Israel. It seems perfectly plausible that Spinoza would have read this kabbalistic classic. Wachter, however, carried his interpretation to the point of contending that Spinoza’s thought is the essence of Judaism, and not a recent heresy. To convert the Jews one would therefore have to make them realise that they are all Spinozists.

Spinoza has been read in many different ways at different times: as the consistent Cartesian who demolished Descartes’s theory of substance; as a late medieval Jewish thinker who abandoned the medieval framework; as the first systematic atheist; as a secret Kabbalist; as a pantheist; as a ‘god-intoxicated’ man; as the first secular Jew, or secularist tout court; as the first political Zionist; as a self-hating Jew; as a quasi-Buddhist; as an early feminist. All of these have been proposed. Which is right?

Many new possibilities of deciding that question now exist, based on our much greater knowledge of the Jewish community of the Netherlands and Dutch intellectual and religious history. We are at the opening of a new era, as we find out more about the issues Spinoza was discussing and the people he might have discussed them with. We know that he was involved with members of Collegiant and Mennonite groups, and probably some Quakers and former Jews, like Juan de Prado, from before the excommunication until the 1660s. He then seems to have become involved with serious thinkers abroad, like Henry Oldenburg and Robert Boyle. We know that in The Hague he discussed philosophy with the libertines Charles Saint-Evremond and Henry Morelli, with Leibniz, and with people around the Prince de Condé. In the last four years of his life, when he was living in the home of the painter Hendrik van der Spijk, we are told that he spent most of his time working and studying, but also found time to make at least two hundred charcoal drawings of his visitors – many learned and eminent persons, including ‘ladies of quality’ and some Jews. Van der Spijk showed them to people as late as 25 years after Spinoza’s death. I have always hoped that they still exist and may yet be found.

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The house on the site has been rebuilt, and so the room he occupied is, as his biographer J.M. Thompson has said, a metaphysical space. You go down a passage between shops; it widens a little, into a high-walled enclosure. It doesn’t look like a place where a tragedy would occur, but if we had a diagnostic for such places we would always cross the road and stay away. In 1791 the gateway opened into a yard, with sheds where wood was stored; Maurice Duplay, who owned the house, was a master-carpenter. In this courtyard, Paul Barras saw two generals of the Republic picking over the salad herbs for dinner, under the eye of Madame Duplay. Robespierre lived on the first floor, in a low-ceilinged room with the plainest of furnishings.

The historian François Furet tells us: ‘The revolution speaks through him its most tragic and purest discourse.’ It does not matter where he lived or what he was like, or that he walked through this gate the day before his horrible death. His temperament is of no consequence, nor the will that drove his punitively controlled body through the all-night sittings. But this abstract Robespierre is not the one that interests you, as you stand inside the passage, sheltered from the street. After all, you keep his portrait on your wall; if Furet’s formulation convinced you, you would not feel so desolate, and almost panic-stricken. The passage itself is confined and dark. Your throat constricts a little, and you remember what Michelet said: ‘Robespierre strangles and stifles.’ There are closed doors on your left. You glance up to the first floor. The windows are dirty. You say: ‘it is only a metaphysical space.’ Metaphysical wild horses would not drag you into Robespierre’s room or any space that might have been occupied by it. You lean against the wall, expecting something to happen.

When the restaurant was still trading, the management used to hand out a photocopy with a Brief Life on it. Someone thought its tone lacked warmth, and had scribbled in the margin what follows: ‘these walls still resound to the speeches, ardent and flawless, of Maximilien Robespierre.’ The phrase delights you, but you would feel exposed if you had written it. Objectivity is such a god, and your brain, such as it is, interests itself in subjective trivia. He was a man of spectacular absent-mindedness. He liked flowers. Sometimes he laughed till he cried. He caught Madame Tussaud when she slipped and fell downstairs on her sightseeing-trip to the Bastille. Discern a subject, not an object, and feelings creep in. You throw up ramparts and dig trenches to defend yourself against them; one day, perhaps, you will notice that the house you are defending is empty and nobody has been at home for years. Meanwhile you are here in the half-dark with the patriote isolé. ‘Millions of French people were brought up in the worship of Robespierre,’ says François Crouzet in an essay here. How is it that none of them come by? Sometimes you think of leaving flowers in the passage. But you never do it, or let us say, you have never done it yet.

To write about Robespierre you have to find the courage to allow yourself to be mistaken. Otherwise every sentence will be freighted with conditionals and qualifiers, and every quotation prefaced by ‘alleged to have said’. You will contradict yourself, because he contradicts himself. If you want to know why he excites such extremes of adoration and loathing, you have to study not just the biographies but the life stories of the people who wrote them. His 19th-century biographer Ernest Hamel worshipped him, the socialist historians Mathiez and Lefebvre championed him, George Sand called him ‘the greatest man not only of the Revolution but of all known history’. Lord Acton described him as ‘the most hateful character in the forefront of human history since Machiavelli reduced to a code the wickedness of public men’. In 1941 the historian Marc Bloch tried to call time: ‘Robespierrists, anti-Robespierrists, we’ve had enough. We say, for pity’s sake, simply tell us what Robespierre was really like.’

But it’s not so easy. It’s not only novelists who perpetrate fiction, and it seems that whatever you say about him, you say about yourself. ‘The whole corpus of Robespierre studies is a hall of mirrors,’ Mark Cumming says in his piece in this volume. Intending only to look at Robespierre, we see ourselves with our own startled eyes, starved or gross, inflated or diminished. Carlyle’s ‘thin lean Puritan and Precision’ scuttles forever through the English imagination. But would he have been recognised by the man who met the Incorruptible strolling in the Bois de Boulogne, wearing a waistcoat embroidered with roses?

The present book contains 16 essays about what Robespierre thought, what he did, and how he has been perceived and interpreted, not only by historians but by playwrights and novelists. There are chapters on his ideology and vision, on his political role, and on how he has been represented to posterity in the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors are the leading scholars in their field and each essay is presented with impressive clarity of thought and expression. They have avoided the kind of history that asks, in George Rudé’s words, ‘whether he would have been an agreeable dinner companion or a suitable match for my daughter’; though contemporaries did ask these things, of course. The tone is judicious, though an outburst of ritual name-calling from David Jordan belies the subtlety of his longer study, The Revolutionary Career of Maximilien Robespierre. For him, Robespierre is ‘unworldly, resentful, vain, egotistical, susceptible to flattery, contemptuous of or indifferent to all the social pleasures except conversation . . . inflexible, unforgiving . . . secretive . . . obsessively self-regarding’. It’s as well to have it over in the first paragraph. As Baudrillard puts it, ‘There are those who let the dead bury the dead, and there are those who are forever digging them up to finish them off.’

The editors’ introduction highlights the problem of evidence. When Robespierre was dead, outlawed and guillotined in July 1794, his papers were sorted by Courtois, a relative of Danton’s, and Courtois did his job dishonestly, selecting and destroying. Those closest to Robespierre died with him, and few of his former colleagues were interested in putting the record straight. As the editors tell us, the victors of Thermidor ‘not only blackened his memory but possibly also exaggerated his importance for posterity’. Once dead, he could be blamed for the ‘excesses’ of the Terror, but the blame would only stick if he could be shown to have been a powerful, singular figure. There were men who were far more bloody, in intention and in deed: Fouché, Collot, Carrier. He had acted as a check on their ferocity. But he was the best-known of the members of the Committee of Public Safety, their ideologist and spokesman. He is remembered as the theoretician of the Terror. It is he who bears the blame, when blame is handed out.

Robespierre went to live with the Duplays in 1791, in the summer of the backlash against the ‘patriots’, when the radical papers were closed down, presses were smashed, and the left were on the run. Marat disappeared from view, Danton crossed the Channel, but Robespierre simply moved house. He had already gained a Christ-like reputation, but Maurice Duplay was not much like the carpenter of Galilee. A member of the Jacobin Club, he owned other houses besides the one on the rue Saint-Honoré, and had a good business. The Duplays were a plain-living, high-minded family, all of them politically committed. One daughter was married and away, three daughters were still at home. Eléonore, the eldest girl, was an art student. Danton called her Cornélia Copeau: little Miss Woodchip, the carpenter’s daughter. Elisabeth, who was in her mid-teens, talked many years later to the dramatist Sardou. ‘He was so good!’ she said of Robespierre. He listened to all her troubles. He was patient and kind. We used to go for walks and take his dog to swim in the river; in season, we picked cherries and cornflowers. Interpreted by Elisabeth, the Duplay household takes on the bourgeois calm of a painting by Chardin, its inhabitants entranced and absorbed among everyday objects, blocks of colour and light overlaid with a sober, reverential geometry. Sardou was horrified. ‘Which Robespierre had she known?’ He proceeded to demolish her memories. Silly woman! Sentiment was blocking her access to her own history.

It is possible – if fiction is your business – to feel some disturbance about the Maison Duplay. Once behind the gate, Robespierre left only briefly, when his sister Charlotte turned up in Paris and demanded her sisterly right to keep house for him. He would only agree to move a street away, and then at once became ill – he was subject to every kind of psychosomatic attack. Within days he was back in his room over the woodyard. He and Eléonore were seen to walk hand in hand. ‘Eléonore thought she was loved,’ said a fellow-student, ‘but really she only scared him.’ Many people assumed that she was Robespierre’s mistress. It is interesting, if he was the judgmental prig of legend, that he didn’t seem to care what people thought.

Robespierre was 36 when he died and we know almost nothing about the first 30 years of his life. There is a persistent legend that the Robespierres were of Irish origin, but both J.M. Thompson and the painstaking French novelist Marianne Becker have traced the family back to Northern France in the 15th century. Maximilien was born in Arras in 1758, four months after his parents’ marriage: so he was by way of an accident. His father François was a lawyer, and his mother was the daughter of a master-brewer. When he was six, she died in giving birth to her fifth child. After her death, François ran up debts, started disappearing for long periods and finally went for good. The children were parcelled out among the family. Maximilien was a quiet child who liked to keep small birds, though later, of course, people would decide that it was for the purpose of cutting off their heads with a toy guillotine which he had – with uncanny prescience – invented for the purpose.

When Maximilien was 12 he was awarded a scholarship to the Collège Louis-le-Grand in Paris. He was poor to a humiliating degree, but formidably diligent and clever. In his early twenties he returned to Arras, having qualified as a lawyer. He began to pay off his father’s debts. He had a reasonable success and was appointed to a minor judicial position. Sometimes he drove into the country with friends; sometimes he wrote light verse. But he soon managed to alienate sections of the local establishment. He did not want what the old regime could give him, and within a few years he would make himself a person with nothing to lose. He identified with victims, and would use the language of victimhood like an offensive weapon. He constantly declared that people were trying to ‘oppress’ him; if you disagreed with him, he would declare himself ‘oppressed’. He began to refer, in his writing, to the ‘laborious life’ and early death he foresaw. He had an unspecific but powerful intimation of disaster and glory. Montesquieu informed his intellect and Rousseau informed his emotions. Later he described himself as ‘timid as a child’ and said that he shook with nerves when he had to make a speech. He was not constituted for confrontation. His voice, people said, was not strong; so it was up to him to create, in those halls of the Revolution with their disastrous acoustics, a climate in which he would command a hushed assent.

In 1789 he was elected to the Estates General and went to Versailles. In the National Assembly which evolved from the Estates, he was part of a tiny radical minority, but this did not bother him because he did not count in the ordinary way. He was always part of a greater majority: the People and Maximilien, Maximilien and the People. He quickly suspected that the heroes of ‘89, when in power, were merely old regime politicians with a different vocabulary. They spoke the language of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, while furthering their sectional interests. He tried to shame them into following the logic of their proclaimed principles; mostly, he failed. In the two years following the taking of the Bastille, he pursued an impeccably liberal and far-sighted agenda. He spoke for manhood suffrage and against a property qualification for voters; against slavery; in support of civil rights for Jews; against capital punishment; and against censorship.

The two latter principles, notoriously, would buckle under pressure. In the early years of the Revolution he let the radical press establish his credentials. From the spring of 1792 to the early summer of the following year he made a low-key venture into journalism, publishing a weekly paper, of comment rather than news. His distributor was in the cour du Commerce, on Marat’s doorstep. It is hard to imagine him in that territory of inky little hacks, trading sneers and insults over each others’ misprints. He had been, as Hugh Gough’s essay says, ‘consistent and tenacious’ in defence of press freedom and had refused to take legal action over the many libels published against him, believing that public opinion would vindicate him. After the fall of the monarchy, the anti-censorship case had to give way; only a community of saints would have allowed the royalist press the opportunity to campaign for a restoration. In the spring of 1794, his childhood friend Camille Desmoulins would tell him that it was not vertu but freedom of thought that was the basis of a republic; but the offending issue of the Vieux Cordelier would not make it into print and the childhood friend would go to the scaffold. In this affair you can convict him of timidity, or of coldness of heart, rather than hypocrisy. It is unhelpful to read a man backwards. Robespierre’s early commitment to press freedom was genuine, but did not extend to a press which, as he saw it, had been systematically corrupted. As Gough shows, the Committee of Public Safety, when Robespierre was a member, did not reintroduce the repressive censorship of the old regime nor anticipate that of the Directory; though perhaps it was want of capacity, rather than lack of will. By late 1793, Robespierre profoundly feared the press. A syllable, he felt, could sabotage his policy. For example, he had said: ‘the republic, one and indivisible.’ The press reported that he had said ‘one and universal’; thus aligning him with distrusted cosmopolitan radicals. He did not think this was a mishearing, but a plot to trap him.

His personal history gave him no reason to believe that the world would let him have his say. He was, it is reported, frequently shouted down and silenced early in his parliamentary career. He had no presence, there were no crowd-pleasing mannerisms or orator’s flourishes. Historians usually report that his speeches are arid. It is interesting, then, to read his speech against capital punishment, which is as fresh as if it had been made today. It is perfectly constructed, a brilliant fusion of logic and emotion: as much a work of art as a building or a piece of music could be. You can believe that, as Desmoulins reported, he could bring 800 men to their feet in a single moment. You could quibble over the head-count, but the power seemed to be real. It extended to the women of Paris, who attended the public galleries of the Jacobin Club. This worried his contemporaries. They thought he was taking some sneaky advantage. ‘What a man this is, with his crowd of women around him!’ said Rabaud Saint-Etienne. Condorcet, the champion of women’s rights, sulked because he had got their attention.

The status which Robespierre achieved in the Revolution cannot be explained in traditional political terms. For most of his career he fought shy of office, and most of the parliamentary measures he proposed were rejected as too progressive. When he joined the Committee of Public Safety he did so in the quietest manner possible, simply replacing a member who had fallen ill. Soon after he joined the Committee, it began to accrete executive power, till it was the effective Government of France. Its proceedings were generally not minuted, so his role is often unclear. Is he speaking for himself, or for the Government? Whatever the source of his authority, he was undeniably effective. David Jordan’s essay describes him as ‘that rare being, an ideologue with exquisite political reflexes’. Part of the secret of his success, no doubt, was that initially he was underrated. He was cautious, and could bury himself in detail; these traits were thought the hallmarks of mediocrity. But he had a canny sense of timing and the kind of persistence that wore his opponents down; the weary Danton, at his trial, described him as ‘above all, tenacious’. The Robespierre of 1793 is the patron saint of the formerly overlooked, one of the meek who are to inherit the earth. His moral authority held together under pressure of circumstance, and his reputation for probity often seemed the one constant when coalitions were fragile and the reading of events uncertain. He was an idealist who did not believe in losing. As Coleridge put it, ‘Robespierre . . . possessed a glowing ardour that still remembered the end, and a cool ferocity that never either overlooked or scrupled the means.’

In May 1793 he told the Convention: ‘To fulfil your mission, you must do exactly the contrary of what existed before you.’ Alan Forrest’s essay on his part in war organisation shows him confronting the generals with unblinking radicalism. He had opposed a declaration of war by the French, which made him temporarily unpopular. But he knew that, in times of war, public liberty never increases. He was suspicious of soldiers in general, their outlook; they were oppressors by nature, he thought. He was sceptical of the notion that the French Army would spread freedom through Europe: ‘who loves armed missionaries?’ He suspected that the war was unwinnable, and that once it began it could not be limited. Victories might be more lethal than defeats; he saw a military dictatorship as the end of it, and of course he was right. But as Forrest shows, he became ‘a war leader in spite of himself’, his imagination and his willingness to tear up the rule book contributing to the high morale of the volunteers and helping to win the Republic’s battles. Ideology reinforced strategy. The ambit of heroism was not narrowly defined; a woman who sent her son to the front was also a hero. The soldier was not a brute, but a citizen: not cannon-fodder but a free man whose intelligence must be addressed.

But it’s not enough to win; you have to be right. The Revolution, he believed, must be justified at every step, and every Revolutionary action must be an expression of virtue. No cynic ever learns anything about Robespierre; unable to come to grips with ‘virtue’, he retires, baffled. There is a problem with the English word ‘virtue’. It sounds pallid and Catholic. But vertu is not smugness or piety. It is strength, integrity and purity of intent. It assumes the benevolence of human nature towards itself. It is an active force that puts the public good before private interest. Its meaning is explored in Patrice Higonnet’s Goodness beyond Virtue (1998), which is an extraordinary manual of practical Jacobinism. Higonnet has not much time for Robespierre, who, he says, ‘probably died a virgin’ (not that historians ever gossip, of course). But his book shows the
day-to-day vitality, during the Revolution, of ideas which had a venerable pedigree, but which had been presumed to be entirely theoretical. Robespierre thought that, if you could imagine a better society, you could create it. He needed a corps of moral giants at his back, but found himself leading a gang of squabbling moral pygmies.

This is how Virtue led to Terror. Virtue and Terror became inseparable, a single Janus-faced god who guarded the gate to a better world. Was the violence of 1793-
94 just the product of circumstances, forced on an unwilling Government panicked by war, civil war and sabotage? Or was it somehow the logical outcome of everything that had gone before? By late 1793 there was a rotten substructure to the Revolution, a web of crooked Army contracts, stockmarket frauds and forgeries, and a capital full of spies and foreign persons of, as Robespierre saw it, dubious worth and allegiance; all information which came to the Government was suspect at source. Also, it was clear that the Sovereign People did not always act in its own best interests. It seemed, from the actions of looters and strikers, that it was given to short-term thinking. Robespierre tried to forge an inner consistency, clinging to the idea of a virtuous people misled by corrupt and factious politicians, by enemies who were masked and veiled. If the Revolution didn’t have moral force behind it, it was merely a series of self-serving crimes. Danton had laughed at the idea of virtue; he was therefore not fit to govern. After the courtroom battle with the Dantonists, Robespierre began to fear that the trial process was itself anti-patriotic, criminal, dangerous: the existing law bred crime, if it protected the enemies of the people. Four years of polemics had failed to save the patrie, which was a spiritual, rather than a temporal space; the battle for territory was less important than the battle for the imagination. From now on, there were to be no trials, in the old meaning of the word. The enemy could be judged by his actions, not by a hypocritical form of words he might wield in his defence. There were to be no more arguments, only justice, as swift as death on the field. It was Hérault de Séchelles who, before falling victim to the guillotine, had described it as ‘a sabre cut’.

It is monstrous, of course. But – in practice – the monstrosity did not belong to Robespierre alone. What he embraced as principle, others embraced for aggrandisement. His religion, which some Jacobins mocked as a private hobby of his, was a creed for toughened spirits, for the habitually unconsoled, and in discovering it he had consulted intuition, not reason. For him, and for Saint-Just no doubt, terror was a means of discovery and self-discovery. In public, one might say that the triumph of good was inevitable. In private, there were spiritual doubts. ‘Vice and virtue forge the destiny of this earth; these two opposing spirits fight each other for it.’ In Robespierre’s mind, the Year II was a battleground, the stage stripped for apocalypse.

Now I will ask you, look at the portraits. Ask what they can tell us. He was so much drawn and painted, as if every amateur artist reached for his pencil, in wonder at what he knew to be a transitory phenomenon. So there is plenty to look at; it is our fault if we can’t see. An Englishman called John Carr, travelling in Paris in 1802, was surprised by a bust ‘taken of him, a short period before he fell’. He noted:

History, enraged at the review of the insatiable crimes of Robespierre, has already bestowed on him a fanciful physiognomy, which she has composed of features which rather correspond with the ferocity of his soul, rather than with his real countenance. From the appearance of this bust, which is an authentic resemblance of him, his face must have been rather handsome. His features were small, and his countenance must have strongly expressed animation, penetration and subtlety.

There is a salon portrait of 1791, attributed to Mme Adelaïde Labille-Guiard. Two years into the Revolution, she has painted a boy with a face of conspicuous sweetness, gentle and shy: a black coat, white cuffs falling over those exquisite, boneless, long-fingered hands that only portrait painters have ever seen. In the posed portraits, he is always smiling: faintly, perhaps; impatiently, perhaps. Then there is a sketch taken from life, 1793, in the National Convention. He is not smiling. He has pushed his spectacles into his hair. His eyes have moved sideways, in suspicion or a kind of dread. Under the sketch the artist Gérard has scribbled: ‘eyes green, complexion pale: coat of green stripe, gilet blue on white, cravat red on white’. A man, as Belloc put it, for colour rather than ornament. The face is still very young; the expression is closed, guarded, as if he had seen something move in the shadows. By Thermidor, it appears he has aged ten years. The final sketch, taken again from life, shows features pared to bone, jaw muscles rigid, every line drawn taut and fine. A day or two after it, Mme Tussaud took his death mask.

The Revolution represented a ruinous physical struggle for its front-line personnel. You didn’t need to be a soldier to be wrecked by it; the home front shattered constitutions, with its unrelenting schedules, its emergencies and exigencies as punishing to the mind as to the body. ‘I confess an immense fatigue,’ Robespierre said, in his last speech to the Convention. In the weeks before it, he had preserved a silence which worked on the nerves of his colleagues. His face became unreadable. But the narrative behind it is always old and always new.

Danton thought he had the story straight: ‘He can’t fuck, and he’s afraid of money.’ Broad-brush portrayal is as far as many historians ever get, because Robespierre is judged in a way that is visceral as much as intellectual. He is a monstrous archetype of the grand inquisitor and mystic, and both historians and imaginative writers have been happy to set up archetypes around him; chiefly Danton himself with his ‘prodigious tout ensemble’. Imagination creates a false opposition between the two men; for most of the Revolution, there was little difference of policy between them, and Robespierre – on the principle that it is better to win even the
battles you have not chosen to fight – abandoned Danton when he could do nothing more for him. But as Norman Hampson says elsewhere, the Danton of legend is hard to resist, especially since he imposed himself on contemporaries as well as posterity. After his death this well-read, greedy, secretive lawyer became a sort of roaring boy, a great-hearted, common-touch, chicken-in-every-pot man. As the 19th century progressed, Robespierre acquired a set of nervous twitches and shudders, and a hideous yellow complexion highlighted by green veins. The 18th-century inch being a variable measure, he shrunk physically, while Danton expanded. As Mark Cumming’s essay describes, Robespierre is accused of ‘physical impotence, cowardice and effeminacy’. Of course, most people who have written about Robespierre are men, and wish themselves to be, au fond, masculine, beneath their academic gowns or tweed jackets. They like to believe that if it came to it they could knock their opponents down: more like Danton than like Robespierre, after all.

Two essays in this collection concentrate on Robespierre in drama and in French fiction. The most famous play about the Revolution is Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Astonishing in form rather than content, it embellishes the legend of the world-weary philosopher done to death by a Robespierre-machine. Anouilh’s Poor Bitos, tricksy in form and hollow at the centre, tells us more about postwar France than about the France of 1793, just as Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton tells us about Poland in the 1980s. If we suspect that Danton is both flattered and denigrated by Gérard Depardieu’s mesmeric performance, we are still repelled by the film’s sick, neurotic, elderly Robespierre. Romain Rolland complained that ‘the greatest figure of the Revolution still has no stature in France’ and proceeded to commemorate him in an unperformable play with a 300-page text and a notional playing time of six hours. Henry Irving played Robespierre in a Sardou melodrama of 1899, in which the Great Terrorist was forced to compromise his principles to save his long-lost illegitimate son. But William Howarth’s essay shows that Robespierre has not been entirely ill-wished by the theatre. An 1888 play by Combet has a memorable stage direction. ‘Then Robespierre appears, borne on clouds. At his entry, the heavenly choir bursts into song.’

Howarth’s piece on Robespierre in drama has little to say about Stanislawa Przybyszewska, on whose work Wajda based his Danton script. She was the maddest of all female Robespierrists (and in this matter I yield to few). Born in 1901, daughter of a Polish writer, she was an artist of starvation and frost, who dated her letters by the Revolutionary calendar, and died at 34, in Danzig, where she had been living in a sort of out-house, unheated through the winters, painting her food with lysol to preserve it, while thinking intensively and extensively about ‘this handsome petty lawyer who at the age of 35 single-handedly ruled France.’ Tuberculosis, morphine and malnutrition were adduced as the causes of death, but she could more truthfully be diagnosed as the woman who died of Robespierre.

If you try to write either drama or novels about the Revolution, you have to consider your likely audience and the state of their prejudices. For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined. It’s no use insisting that you have applied for your licence, either; you may as well brace yourself for attempts to run you off the territory. The editors of this volume are generous about the possible role of fiction in reimagining the past, but Mark Cumming warns about ‘the perilous delights of picturesque history’. We are likely to succumb to them, until history is written by machines; there are not two kinds of history, one sceptical and rational, and the other imaginative and erratic. Cumming makes the uncontentious observation that ‘the historical image is two-faced, pointing outwards to the historical subject and inwards to the author’s psyche.’ This is as much true of academics as of accredited fictionalisers. But it is Carlyle who is the subject of this essay, Carlyle who made it so difficult (for the English-speaking reader, anyway) to look at the Revolution except through the highly-coloured filters which gave us ‘the sea-green incorruptible’. A real heroine of the Revolution is the housemaid who lit the fire with his first draft. Dickens borrowed from Carlyle his best effects, and as Orwell pointed out, A Tale of Two Cities is largely responsible for the English reader’s notion of the Revolution as ‘a frenzied massacre lasting for years . . . whereas in reality the whole of the Terror, so far as the number of deaths goes, was a joke compared to one of Napoleon’s battles . . . To this day, to the average Englishman, the French Revolution means no more than a pyramid of severed heads.’

The general view has not changed much since Orwell’s day. In the non-Francophone world, the bicentennial was dominated by Simon Schama’s Citizens, which does not challenge comfortable preconceptions. Schama uses his narrative skill and his wealth of illustration to confirm people in the belief they already hold, which is that the Revolution was a bloody and nonsensical waste of time. For the French, of course, Schama is irrelevant, because he is telling them nothing they have not heard from their own revisionist historians.

In the present book, Malcolm Cook’s chapter on Robespierre as seen by French novelists serves to show their general timidity, their failure to break with stereotype. But the scope of his enquiry is not wide. Has he not read Dominique Jamet’s 1988 novel Antoine et Maximilien ou la Terreur sans la vertu, with its refreshing portrait of Robespierre as a paedophile and child-murderer? Worth five minutes of anyone’s time, it leads a novelist to examine the ethics of the trade. Imagination must be free, the dead have no remedy in law; all they can do is haunt you.

Which, in effect, is what Robespierre does. He takes a grip on the imagination and does not easily let you go. Michelet, ambivalent about the Incorruptible, always crossing and recrossing the line of his own argument, accused Louis Blanc, Hamel and others of a corrupting partiality: ‘You have a friend in the city, and this friend is Robespierre.’ But in her 1997 book Mourning Glory, Marie-Hélène Huet quotes a passage in which Michelet, having completed his great history of the French Revolution, speaks of what Robespierre had come to mean to him:

In this entire history, which was my life and my inner world for ten years, I formed, on the road, many deep bonds of friendship . . . The greatest void I felt at this whitewood table, from which my book now departs, and where I remain alone, was the departure of my pale companion, the most faithful of them all, who had not left me from ‘89 to Thermidor; the man of great will, hard-working like me, poor like me, with whom I had, each morning, so many fierce discussions.

Michelet’s book is finished; the argument still smoulders in the air.

In his last weeks, Robespierre stayed out of the public eye. He went for walks in the woods or shut himself up at the rue Honoré. No one supposed he was a spent force, but after the death of the Dantonists he had seemed to lose his sureness of touch. He could not survive if he trusted nobody, and could not work out who to trust. The truth about the motives of his fellow-revolutionaries seemed to be beyond mortal reach. In his 1978 biography of Danton, Norman Hampson pointed out that ‘the truth was whatever corresponded to anything that Robespierre wanted to believe at any particular time.’ But there is a difficulty here: in what words can the truth be told, when the secret enemies of the Revolution have stolen its language? He had always warned that the devil had the best tunes. All that is left for him is the word which is guaranteed because it is spoken by a dying man. ‘What objection can be made to a man who wishes to speak the truth and agrees to die for it?’

The Revolution, as a creative enterprise, died with him. There is a formulation in which his death is a kind of blessed release for the nation; but after it, the Terror continued, and what lay ahead was a new tyranny and 20 years of war. In his last speech to the Convention, he said: ‘my reason, not my heart, is beginning to doubt this republic of virtue which I have set myself to establish.’ The heart leaves its faint trace: Michelet alone at the whitewood table, Stanislawa obsessively rewinding her typewriter ribbon. Otherwise, not much is left except a battered document case in the Musée Carnavalet, placed in proximity to Danton’s large monogrammed knives and forks. The leather is stamped with Robespierre’s name, but it has almost faded away. As Lamartine says, ‘he was the last word of the Revolution, but nobody could read it.’

On the final document his signature is unfinished. He had written just two letters of his name, before a pistol shot shattered his jaw; whether he fired the shot himself, no one really knows. Lying in his own blood in an anteroom of the Committee of Public Safety, he gestured that he wished to write, but no one would give him a pen. I would have given him a pen, Barras said later, uneasy at the cruelty and the lack of a possible disclosure. He was half-dead when he was taken to the scaffold, and his decapitated remains were buried near the Parc Monceau. Eléonore survived, and was known as ‘the widow Robespierre’. Maurice Duplay was imprisoned and driven out of business. His wife was found dead in her cell. Fear sealed the lips of witnesses, papers were burned, memories were reformulated. After the revolution of 1830, a group of admirers tried to locate the body. But though they dug and dug, no one was there.

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Letters
Vol. 22 No. 8 · 13 April 2000

From W.S. Milne
Hilary Mantel mentions Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton in her review of Colin Haydon and William Doyle’s Robespierre (LRB, 30 March). The central ‘character’ in that film is neither Danton nor Robespierre, but the guillotine itself, the inanimate menace behind all the rhetoric and posturing. It looms like Death at the beginning and end of the film, and appears intermittently during it. Unwrapped from its sticky, stiff tarpaulin cover, it is revealed as the reality underlying the Revolution’s abstractions. As for the ‘small’ numbers who went to the guillotine compared to those killed in one Napoleonic battle, it is the nature of the machine that interests Wajda. He uses it to evoke the cold, calculating, rational nature of the state itself (vertu, justice, integrity, whatever you want to call it). What better embodiment of the paradox of Robespierre himself and the ‘progressive’ politics and technologies of the Enlightenment: butchery in a basket, the clean shave if you step out of line.

W.S. Milne
Esher, Surrey

Vol. 22 No. 9 · 27 April 2000

From Charles Swann
I am uncertain what Hilary Mantel meant when she wrote, in her piece about Robespierre (LRB, 30 March) that ‘a real heroine of the Revolution is the housemaid who lit the fire’ with the first draft of Carlyle’s French Revolution. I’m not being picky about the facts (though one fire with the whole manuscript makes for misgivings), but if she is blaming Carlyle for leaving the English reader with an impression that the Terror is at the centre of the French Revolution, she does him an injustice:

It was the frightfulest thing ever born of Time? One of the frightfulest. This Convention, now grown Anti-Jacobin, did, with an eye to justify and fortify itself, publish Lists of what the Reign of Terror had perpetrated: Lists of Persons Guillotined. The Lists, cries splenetic Abbé Montgaillard, were not complete. They contain the names of, How many persons thinks the Reader? – Two-thousand all but a few. There were above Four-thousand, cries Montgaillard: so many were guillotined, fusilladed, noyaded, done to dire death; of whom Nine-hundred were women. It is a horrible sum of human lives, M.l’Abbé: – some ten times as many shot rightly on a field of battle, and one might have had his Glorious-Victory with Te-Deum. It is not far from the two hundredth part of what perished in the entire Seven-Years War. By which Seven-Years War, did not the great Fritz wrench Silesia from the great Theresa … The head of man is a strange vacant sounding-shell, M.l’Abbé …

Such things were; such things are; and they go on in silence peaceably: – and Sansculottisms follow them. History, looking back over this France through long times … confesses mournfully that there is no period to be met with, in which the general Twenty-five Millions of France suffered less than in this period which they name Reign of Terror! But it was not the Dumb Millions that suffered here; it was the Speaking Thousands, and Hundreds, and Units; who shrieked and published, and made the world ring with their wail … that is the grand peculiarity.

Charles Swann
Keele University

Vol. 22 No. 10 · 18 May 2000

From Hilary Mantel
Charles Swann (Letters, 27 April) accuses me of an injustice to Thomas Carlyle, perpetrated in my piece on Robespierre. I am guilty as charged. It is true that I haven’t the facts about precisely how the housemaid – I shall call her, from now on, ‘the legendary housemaid’ – lit the fire with the first draft of Carlyle’s manuscript on the French Revolution. It is indeed possible that she went on to stuff some pages in the kitchen range; or that she had merely kindled a spark with an epigraph, when big boots stamped it out. I am indulging in picturesque history, am I not? The kind that Carlyle taught us.

In cheering on this wonderful domestic, I am not so much questioning Carlyle’s interpretation of the events of 1793-94, as simply regretting – rather whimsically, perhaps, and not altogether seriously – that his book on the French Revolution ever saw the light of day. My point is that the English imagination can’t get past it and that naive people (I am sure Charles Swann isn’t one of them) think it is holy writ; they count themselves well up in the topic if they’ve read it. For the longest time, I didn’t know Carlyle was to be taken seriously. I read his history of the Revolution in my teens, and, having no faculty of awe, thought it was a comic turn. Then, when I had my novel about the Revolution published, I was amazed that reviewers were keen to drag in references to it, so that we’d know they knew their stuff; and kind people asked me: Were you not very much influenced by it? Was it not the book that fired your interest?

W.S. Milne’s letter in the previous issue points to the primacy of the image of the guillotine in Andrzej Wajda’s film Danton. I agree with his analysis of the film, though I might not go so far as to call the guillotine a ‘character’. The issues are complicated and I don’t want to seem dismissive of the many interesting studies of the guillotine as icon of the Revolution; however, though it is unfashionable to say so, I am not sure that a concentration on iconography helps us to understand what happened in the Year II. Or perhaps I should say, it helps us to understand what happened from our point of view, but not from theirs; it helps us to formulate elegant intellectual trivialities, and distracts us from the less exciting business of working through speeches and writing to see what the Revolutionaries themselves thought they were doing. The guillotine was not invented or designed as an instrument of the Terror, but came into use in 1790, in very different conditions. Wajda, Milne says, ‘uses it to evoke the cold, calculating, rational nature of the state itself’. But we need not capitulate to Wajda’s imagination, any more than we need to capitulate to Carlyle’s: any more than you need to capitulate to mine. The guillotine offered, according to Milne, ‘the clean shave if you step out of line’. Which line would you have walked, if you wanted to stay alive in 1794? The line taken by one of the factions in the Committee of Public Safety? The Police Committee’s line, if you knew what it was? The Commune’s line? I am not sure that rationality had much to do with the events of those months. No one who went to the guillotine thought he was suffering because Robespierre was being too reasonable today.

Hilary Mantel
Knaphill, Surrey